Built around a 1080p DLP chip and clearly designed more for home-theater than home-entertainment use, the BenQ W7500 ($2,799) lacks both the built-in audio system you would expect in a home-entertainment projector, and the small size that would let you carry it around easily. On the other hand, with a 2,000-lumen rating, it is unusually bright for theater-dark lighting, which means it can stand up to moderate ambient light for home-entertainment use in a family room. In either role, it's an excellent choice if you want high-quality video.

Like other projectors in its price range, including the Editors' Choice Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 5020UBe, the W7500's price alone is enough to tell you that it's aimed at moderately serious videophiles. If you have any doubts about that, note that according to BenQ, it's sold exclusively by dealers that will typically install the projector for you (at an additional cost).

The dealer installation is significant in this case, because included in the price is ISFccc calibration, which tunes the projector to give you the best possible image with your specific screen and room lighting. If you're setting the projector up in a room with ambient light, you even get two customized calibration settings, with one for daytime and one for nighttime. For my tests, BenQ didn't provide the calibration service, but even without it, the image quality was impressive.

Advanced Features

As you might expect, the W7500 offers any number of advanced features to help justify its price. Among the more important are a 1.5x manual zoom and both vertical and horizontal lens shift. The zoom is less than the 2.1x that the Epson 5020UBe offers, but it's enough to give you significant flexibility in how far you can put the projector from the screen for a given image size. The lens shift offers similar flexibility for moving the image up, down, left, or right without having to move the projector.

I measured the horizontal shift at roughly plus or minus 22 percent left or right from the center position and the vertical shift at roughly 13 percent up or down. This is significantly less than some of the competition, including the Epson 5020UBe, but it's enough to be useful. And keep in mind that some models in this price range, including the ViewSonic Pro9000 for example, don't offer lens shift at all.

The W7500 offers the usual assortment of advanced video features for its price range, including support for video at 1080p and 24 frames per second (fps); frame interpolation to optionally smooth the judder in movies filmed at 24 fps; and full 3D support at 1080p for Blu-ray and other video sources. It also offers better than typical color calibration controls, letting you set both primary (red, green, blue) and secondary (cyan, yellow, magenta) colors by adjusting hue, saturation, and brightness of each color. For most people, this hue-saturation-brightness color model is much more intuitive than the approach most projectors use.

Setup and Brightness

Setting up the W7500 isn't an issue, since the dealer will be doing it for you. However, it may be helpful to know that the projector measures a relatively large 5.7 by 16.9 by 12.4 inches (HWD), which may affect where you want to put it.

The W7500 offers a fairly typical set of connectors, including two HDMI ports for video sources or a computer, a VGA port for a computer or component video, three RCA phono plugs for component video, and both composite video and S-video ports. As with most home theater projectors, there's no audio system. Also missing is an audio out port, which means you not only need an external audio system, but you can't automatically switch the audio source when you change the video source.

The 2,000-lumen rating in the brightest mode would be far too bright for most traditional home theaters. As a point of reference, if you follow SMPTE (The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) recommendations, 2,000 lumens would be appropriate for roughly a 205-inch diagonal image in theater-dark lighting with a 1.0 gain screen. However you can lower the brightness substantially by setting the lamp to Eco mode, using one of the less bright presets like Cinema mode, or both.

As I've already suggested, you can also take advantage of the higher brightness levels to use the projector in a room with ambient light. I had no trouble finding a comfortable brightness level for the 92-inch diagonal image I used for testing in theater-dark lighting or for the 80-inch diagonal image I used in a family room with lots of windows.

2D and 3D Image Quality

The W7500's 2D image quality is impressive. Even with the default settings, the projector delivers excellent color quality, obviously high contrast, and blacks that are noticeably dark black. The projector also did well on color balance, with suitably neutral grays at all levels from black to white in all preset modes, and it did a near excellent job with shadow detail (details based on shading in dark areas).

One potential issue is rainbow artifacts, with light areas breaking up into flashes of red, green, and blue. These artifacts are always a concern for single-chip DLP projectors, because of the way they create colors. The bad news is that if you see these artifacts easily, as I do, you'll see them occasionally with the W7500. The good news is that even if you see them easily, you may not see them often enough to find them annoying. I certainly saw them far less often than with the vast majority of DLP projectors.

As with most home theater projectors today, the W7500 offers HDMI 1.4a support, which lets you connect to a Blu-ray player, cable or satellite box, or other video device to show 3D at 1080p. The projector's 3D image quality earns the same high praise as its 2D quality for all the features the two share. In addition, I saw no crosstalk and only a hint of 3D-related motion artifacts in scenes that tend to bring them out.

As with most of the competition, the projector doesn't come with any 3D glasses, so if you want to use 3D be prepared to spend extra for DLP-link glasses. In my tests the projector worked with both 120Hz and 144Hz glasses, even with 1080p 24 fps video.

The BenQ W7500 is well worth its price, with excellent image quality, a wide range of brightness settings, and a long list of features, including the conveniences of both a moderately large zoom and lens shift. If it didn't show rainbow artifacts, it would be a strong contender for Editors' Choice. As it is, the rainbow-free Editors' Choice Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 5020UBe has the clear advantage, and even the less expensive Editor's Choice Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 3020e has an advantage on this score. But if you don't see rainbows easily, or don't find them annoying if you see them only occasionally, the BenQ W7500 may well be the projector you want.