The Epson Pro EX7280 3LCD WXGA projector is tough competition for the NEC NP-ME401W, which it replaces as our top pick in its category. It shares the same WXGA (1,280-by-800-pixel) resolution as the NEC model, and most of the same key strengths—particularly in brightness and image quality. It's also significantly less expensive, at $699.99, which gives it a big edge if you don't need the NP-ME401W's Ethernet port or its 1.7x zoom lens. The combination of a lower price and close match in capabilities with the NEC model makes the EX7280 our new Editors' Choice pick for a WXGA projector for midsize or large rooms.

The Benefits of Three LCDs

One of the reasons the NP-ME401W and EX7280 share so many strengths is that both are built around a 3LCD design, meaning they use three LCD chips to generate all three primary colors at once, instead of a single DLP chip and a spinning color wheel that puts only one color on the screen at a time. The design guarantees the image won't have any rainbow artifacts—the red-green-blue flashes that some people see easily and find annoying.

This is an important benefit, since even if you don't see these flashes yourself, they can be distracting for someone you're giving a presentation to or to students in a classroom. The design also ensures matching color and white brightness, which means color images will be as bright as you'd expect from an ANSI lumen measurement for white brightness.

The EX7280 is one of Epson's portable business projectors, and it comes with a carrying case should you want to tote it. However, at 5.7 pounds and 3.6 by 11.9 by 9.3 inches (HWD), it's a size and weight that often winds up on a cart or permanently installed. Setup is straightforward, consisting of little more than putting it in position, pointing it at the screen, and adjusting the manual focus and 1.2x zoom.

Connection options are a little limited compared with the NP-ME401W, the most notable differences being a single HDMI port instead of two and the lack of an Ethernet port. However, there's a VGA port for a second source, suitable for a PC or component video input, and a composite video input as well, should you have an older video source that needs it. You also get Wi-Fi support for connecting to a network, and Wi-Fi Direct for connecting directly from a phone or Windows PC for screen mirroring. The projector even puts a QR code on screen for quick and easy connection, which worked as promised in my tests.

One nice touch is a split-screen feature that lets you show input from two sources at once. Menu options let you easily choose which source goes on each side of the screen, swap their positions, set both to be equal in size, or set one side to be larger. You can even choose which audio input to use.

The onboard 2-watt mono speaker offers usable sound quality at high-enough volume for a small to midsize room, though it's noticeably tinny, particularly at higher volumes. One minor oversight is the lack of an audio-out port. If you need better sound quality, higher volume, or stereo, you'll need to connect an external sound system to the audio source rather than through the projector.

Testing the EX7280: Bright, Top-Tier Presentations

The EX7280 offers five color modes. All of them delivered appropriately crisp, readable text, and fine detail for the 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution, plus nicely saturated, eye-catching color for graphics. For photorealistic images, the color accuracy varied from spot-on in the most-accurate color mode to more than acceptable by most people's standards in the least-accurate one. (That would be the brightest, Dynamic, as with virtually all projectors.)

For business graphics, some colors in Dynamic mode—particularly light blues—were a little less saturated than they should have been, but I saw none of the green shift that's so common for the brightest modes of many projectors. Cinema and sRGB had the most accurate color, but all the modes delivered colors in photos, video, and film that were well within the realm of realistic. If I weren't so familiar with the images in our test suite, I wouldn't have spotted any color errors in any mode except Dynamic. In short, any of the modes, including the Brightest mode, should be acceptable for most applications, which leaves you free to chose the one with the best brightness level for image size and room lighting.

That said, you might want to be a little more finicky about picking a mode if you include video or film clips in your presentations, or are using the projector in a classroom where you occasionally show longer movies. Cinema and sRGB are the obvious picks in that case, since they were pretty much tied for color accuracy in my tests. Between them, sRGB had the better shadow detail, but lost any sense of three dimensionality in dark scenes. I found that tweaking the brightness setting in Cinema mode increased its shadow detail without making the picture look as flat as it did with sRGB, which made the modified version of Cinema mode my choice for film and video.

Ultimately, none of the picture modes is a match for what you'd expect from even a low-end home theater projector, but any of them delivered a highly watchable image for film and video straight out of the box, while Cinema with its brightness adjusted properly did the best job. There's no support for 3D, as is true for most LCD-based business and education projectors.

The rated 4,000 ISO lumens for the EX7280—which is equivalent to ANSI lumens and a match for the NP-ME401W—is bright enough according the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations to light up a 280-inch, 16:10 1.0 gain screen in a dark room. Even in moderately bright ambient light, it's enough for a 160-inch screen. In my tests, after dropping the brightness by switching to Eco power mode and the lower-brightness Cinema picture mode, the projector still lit up my 90-inch screen with a suitably bright image. This was in a room with all the lights on and daylight streaming through the windows.

Verdict: Our Top Pick for WXGA Projectors

Keep in mind that if you never show anything more demanding than PowerPoint presentations with big fonts and you don't need a widescreen aspect ratio, a lower-resolution projector can serve just as well. The Epson EX3280, for example—our current top pick for an XGA (1,024-by-768-pixel) projector for a midsize room—is almost as bright as the EX7280 and a bit cheaper. Or, if you need to show images with fine detail, you may need a higher-resolution model like the 1080p (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) Epson Pro EX9240.

That said, if WXGA is the right resolution, and you need high-enough brightness to fill a screen size appropriate for a midsize to large room, either the EX7280 or NP-ME401W should serve nicely. But unless you need the NP-ME401W's extra features, most notably the Ethernet connector or large zoom range, the Epson Pro EX7280 will do the job for less. And that's enough to make it our new Editors' Choice pick for a  WXGA projector for a midsize to large room.