Epson EH-TW480 review

We found that Living Room provided the best image quality, as Theatre and Game tended to sap the vibrancy out of colours while Dynamic looked far too bright and green. In Living Room mode, colours were deep and vivid thanks in part to its very bright 2,800 ANSI lumen lamp. Its main downfall, though, was its poor black levels. Switching the power consumption to Eco mode helped make blacks appear ever so slightly darker, but night scenes in particular still looked quite grey regardless.

Black level issues aside, we had very little trouble watching the rest of our test footage, even in our brightly lit test room. We did notice a very small amount of pixellation, which is one of the main shortcomings of LCD projectors, as well as the occasional stutter during fast camera pans, but overall we didn’t find either of these issues to be too much of an irritation.

Lamp life is pretty good at 4,000 hours at full brightness and 5,000 in ECO mode. This equated to running costs of 3p and 2p per hour respectively.

We liked the projector’s remote as well. It doesn’t have a huge range of options, but it gives you quick and easy access to the colour mode, input source, volume, freeze, aspect ratio and a mouse pointer. It’s quite small, but its buttons are very easy to use.

The Epson EH-TW480 is an excellent entry-level projector. It has a few minor issues, but these aren’t enough to stop it from being one of our favourite 720p projectors. It may not be able to project in 3D like the similarly priced BenQ W703D, but its broad menu system and impressive picture quality put it miles ahead of its competitors. It wins a Budget Buy award.