BenQ W1000 review

Benq's W1000 is a compact and quiet DLP projector with an attractively understated design and a 1080p resolution. It has composite, component, S-video and two HDMI inputs. Its slim white chassis won't take over a room, whether you ceiling mount it or place it on a shelf. Like the company's cheaper W600, it doesn't have a lens cap, although its recessed lens should help protect it from dust and scratches. An integrated speaker comes on every time you start the projector, but this easily muted by a button on the remote control. The remote is a little cluttered, but lights up when used and all the buttons are clearly labelled.

At just under £1,000, the W1000 is at the budget end of the 1080p projector market, but performs well. We were immediately taken by its rich, vibrant colours and deep blacks. Like most colour-wheel DLP projectors, it suffers from the DLP rainbow effect. This was primarily visible on some high-contrast panning shots and around the on-screen icons from our Blu-ray player and proved to be incredibly distracting. Rainbow effect notwithstanding, the W1000 has beautifully balanced contrast, with deep black tones and vivid, delicately shaded and realistic highlights. We were impressed by the W1000's low level of motion blur in our motion response test and on sports footage.

The projector has three pre-set modes and three extra user-definable modes. The presets are Cinema, which has intense colours, and is best suited to watching a film in a darkened room; Dynamic, which looks a little cold but ramps up the brightness to ensure that the projected image is clear and vivid with the lights on, and Standard, which is a compromise between the two that looks okay with the lights on but works best in darkness. Each of these can be used as a reference from which you can fine-tune settings to create your own preset. As well as the usual brightness, contrast and colour intensity settings, you can also adjust the colour tint to make the image more green or magenta, and make subtle saturation adjustments to make flesh tones as realistic as possible. This flexibility is great, but the default settings are more than adequate.

Even more settings are available in the Picture: Advanced menu, where you can adjust the gamma and enable and disable Brilliant Colour mode, which produces more vivid, but less naturalistic colour reproduction. Even more fine adjustment is available in sub-menus, like Clarity Control, where you can reduce noise and enhance detail, and the slight confusing 3D Colour Management menu, which allows you to adjust the intensity of red, green or blue tones.

There's a lot to like about this projector. It's bright enough to work well in a fully lit room, thanks to its 2,000 ANSI lumens brightness, but has colour and image quality that made our test videos come to life. It's cheap to run, costing just 6p per hour at full brightness and 4p per hour in economy mode.

Unfortunately, we found it almost impossible to get past the DLP rainbow effect, which was very visible in dark scenes, black and white films, and high-contrast titles. It's a shame, as this projector is otherwise decent at an attractive price.