Epson EH-TW490 review

When watching Blu-ray movies, the EH-TW490 did a great job at capturing detail, despite the drop in resolution from Full HD to 720p. Native 720p content still looked a little grainy up close but, from a distance, HD broadcasts and PS3 games look great.

Epson’s three-LCD projection system produces the same bright images regardless of content, so colours look just as bright as whites. The EH-TW490 is rated at 3,000 lumens, which is just about bright enough to use in daylight, but we saw the best results when watching video in the dark. Our light meter averaged around 1,000 lux after calibration, suggesting a figure closer to 2,500 lumens from around a metre away.

Darker scenes suffered from a lack of contrast, which made it difficult to make out some of the details in Star Trek. Luckily, you can rescue it slightly by adjusting the brightness and contrast sliders, as well as experimenting with the Auto Iris feature, but it’ll never be perfect.

There are only a few limited picture options beyond the four presets, and the lack of a user mode means you have to use one of Epson’s modes as a base from which to make tweaks. We found the Cinema preset to be the best, but we still had to use the brightness, contrast and 3-channel colour adjust sliders to bring out the detail in darker scenes. There are also sharpness and noise reduction settings, but we didn’t need to use them. It’s difficult to spot any image noise unless you’re watching very low bitrate standard-definition TV. There’s no motion smoothing, so 24p Blu-ray films have a noticeable cinema-style jerkiness that some will love but others won’t appreciate.

The EW-TH490 was never going to compete with high-end home cinema projectors, but we were still impressed with it. Image quality isn’t perfect, as black levels and contrast are somewhat lacking at default settings, and there aren’t enough picture settings to rectify it completely, but the EH-TW490’s picture is bright and colourful, so could be ideal for sports and games if a TV just isn’t big enough.