BenQ W5800

Accompanied by an upper mid-range price tag of £4,599, the W5800 projector boasts plenty of the specs and features that home cinephiles look for when putting together a dedicated movie room. 

For starters, its optics combine laser lighting with a premium 4K DLP chipset capable of producing a claimed maximum 2,600 lumens of light. This isn’t the flat-out highest brightness figure around, but significantly brighter models are typically aimed at ‘casual’ viewing environments where there will usually be ambient light to contend with. For a dark room projector such as the W5800, 2,600 lumens is bright enough to do justice to the high dynamic range (HDR) pictures that projectors are now expected to handle while also leaving room for movie-friendly black levels. 

Talking of HDR, the W5800 can support the HDR10+ format with its extra scene-by-scene data, as well as carrying a built-in tone mapping engine designed to get the maximum impact out of regular HDR10 and HLG HDR feeds. The W5800’s HDR talents are backed up by claimed coverage of the entire DCI-P3 colour gamut used when mastering most of today’s HDR content. 

Add to this a premium 14-element lens and a huge array of picture adjustments, and there’s no doubt that the W5800 sets the right serious home cinema tone. But can it match this with its performance?

Picture quality

Although you need to put in a bit of legwork to get the best out of it, the W5800’s pictures can be both convincing and spectacular - a rare but very welcome combination in today’s tricky-for-projectors HDR world.

The spectacle is, predictably, the first thing that strikes you. Pictures, especially HDR pictures, are driven off the screen with a fearsome level of brightness that actually feels like it’s pushing beyond the claimed 2,600 lumens of maximum brightness. This brightness is potent at both a full-screen level (so that, for instance, bright daylight scenes actually look like bright daylight) and in small, intense areas such as reflections on metal, glints in eyes, neon signs and so on. I’ve seen plenty of projectors that offer, on paper, much more brightness than the W5800 but ultimately deliver much less of this true HDR impact.

Playing around with the extensive set-up options suggests that the W5800 punches above its claimed brightness weight because it’s so ultra-efficient and intelligent in the way it uses the light available to it. The local and global contrast adjustments provided as part of a ‘CinemaMaster’ suite of picture controls, together with a ‘Dynamic Black’ system for adjusting the laser output in response to image content, all play their part in creating a level of HDR impact as consistent and stable as it is punchy. 

The richness of the W5800’s HDR experience is greatly enhanced, too, by one of the best colour performances I’ve seen from an HDR projector costing less than five figures. Right out of the box it delivers a beautiful combination of richness and vibrancy, but also subtlety and balance, that makes the overwrought colours of many HDR-focused premium projectors look positively amateurish. 

Whether it’s a dark scene with lots of faint background shades and tricky low-lit skin tones, or an ultra-vibrant animated film, not a tone feels out of place. Subtle shading areas aren’t beset by blocking or striping glitches either, and there’s no hint of the W5800’s excellent brightness causing any colour to look pale or muted. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The refinement the W5800 manages to hold onto with its colour rendition, even with very heavily saturated images, contributes to another of the projector’s star turns: sharpness. The finesse with which blends are presented helps objects look more three-dimensional, and ensures that no subtle tonal shifts go AWOL in tricky areas such as skin tones or really bright whites. The W5800’s excellent light management, meanwhile, means that dark scenes retain lots of shadow detail in even the blackest corners of the darkest pictures - a talent which also plays its part in helping the W5800’s pictures look fantastically crisp and detailed. 

Some will, not unreasonably, take issue with BenQ’s claim that the W5800’s optical system delivers a true 4K experience, given that it doesn’t carry a true 3840x2160 roster of the tiny mirrors that essentially represent DLP’s physical pixel structure. The influential Consumer Technology Association in the US, though, considers DLP projectors such as the W5800 to be capable of a true 4K experience - and this seems amply backed up by the evidence of my own eyes.

The W5800 isn’t just good at HDR and 4K. It also adapts extremely well to standard dynamic range and HD content. There’s no doubt, though, that it’s the HDR talents that set it apart from the mid-range projector crowd.

The W5800 is not, of course, perfect. The main issue is that its black tones aren’t all that amazing out of the box. Dark scenes and the black bars above and below very widescreen presentations can both look a bit more greyed-over than I’d like. Happily, though, the extensive picture adjustments the W5800 provides include tools that can considerably improve this issue. Reducing the HDR brightness setting by one notch, for instance, setting the Local Contrast feature to Low and deploying the Dynamic Black feature all deliver black level improvements without costing the image too much of the vim and vigour that’s so key to its appeal. 

It’s not unusual for a highly specified projector like this to require a bit of input from you to get the absolute best from it. What really matters is how good the W5800’s best is once you’ve found it.  

Living with

While the W5800 is attractive enough in a big, serious, industrial kind of way to take up residence in a living room, it’s really intended for a dedicated home theatre. Certainly, if it was me, I’d be wanting to get the most out of my new investment by installing it in the sort of blacked-out, serious movie night environment that does it most justice. 

The W5800 sports an excellent array of premium set-up features. You can get its pictures on your screen at the size you want using a motorised adjustment system, for instance, that includes an impressive 1.6x level of optical zoom and a good degree of both vertical and horizontal image shifting. This means you can make the projector fit your room rather than having to somehow make the room fit the projector. 

The W5800 is also packed with set up and calibration options - more than enough, in fact to support a full calibration by an ISF engineer if you’re willing to pay for one (BenQ, though, has tried to save you this expense by calibrating each W5800 in the factory before it’s sent out). You even get a calibration certificate included in the packaging.

BenQ’s projector runs incredibly quietly for such a bright model - even when showing HDR content. This means you don’t need to box it in, or place it a long way from your seating position.

The W5800’s high brightness means that, as well as delivering HDR with more strength than most projectors, it can drive a really big screen without the image starting to dull. Pictures as big as 200 inches across are claimed by BenQ, and I’d definitely say 120- to 140-inch images really wouldn’t be an issue. This matters because, while there are some outstanding and affordable TVs around up to 100 inches these days, if you want to go even slightly bigger than that with a TV, prices (and practicality) soar way beyond what the W5800 costs.

There are a couple of ways, though, in which the W5800’s serious home theatre nature requires you to treat it as only part of a wider installation. First, it doesn’t have any built-in speakers. Second, it doesn’t have a built-in smart system, meaning that it’s totally dependent on external sources for content. 

The W5800’s dedicated home theatre focus is also something to consider if you’re looking for a projector to double up as a king-sized gaming display, since neither of its HDMI ports is capable of supporting 4K/120Hz or variable refresh rate gaming feeds. It can do 4K games (or video) at 60Hz refresh rates with HDR, or 1080p/120Hz games without HDR on an Xbox Series X, but that’s it. The W5800 also doesn’t provide a fast-response game mode in either SDR or HDR mode. This means that if you want to play a game at a 60Hz refresh rate you will have to do so through a seriously sluggish lag time of 125.6ms.

The W5800 deserves to finish on a high note, though. Which I can do by pointing out that its lighting system should be good for more than 20,000 hours, meaning you don’t have to factor in the cost and hassle of changing bulbs every few thousand hours as you do with regular lamp-based projectors.

Conclusion

Once you’ve taken a couple of simple steps to improve its out-of-the-box handling of dark scenes, the W5800’s exceptional sharpness, colour performance and brightness combine to deliver one of the most expressive, immersive and convincing HDR performances I’ve seen from such an affordable projector.   

Test Samples

The Shining 4K Blu-ray

The Shining on 4K Blu-ray proves that the latest and greatest disc format is at least as useful for reinvigorating old classics as it is for delivering the full benefits of the latest filmmaking kit. The W5800 does spectacular justice to the Shining 4K BD’s gorgeously detailed, clean and bright 4K HDR images, making Kubrick’s masterpiece feel like it was made just yesterday.

Forza Horizon 5 Xbox Series X

The latest Forza Horizon game takes the series’ irresistible mix of driving, sightseeing and music to arguably its most vibrant setting yet: Mexico. I’ve picked the game out here because, while the playing experience on the W5800 feels a bit sluggish and unresponsive, the way the projector handles the crispness, vibrancy and ‘every day’s a holiday’ brightness of the game’s graphics shows that it is an enjoyable display for games that don’t rely on fast reactions. 

The Greatest Showman 4K Blu-ray

The 4K Blu-ray of The Greatest Showman features particularly aggressive high dynamic range effects and extreme colour saturations, especially during the circus shows. This gives the W5800 ample opportunity to show off its ability to reproduce essentially the whole of the DCI-P3 digital cinema colour palette.

If you’re looking to set up a permanent, dedicated home cinema room but don’t have an infinite budget, the BenQ W5800 is bright enough, colourful enough, sharp enough and flexible enough to become an excellent centrepiece for what is a very reasonable price.

If you’re spending the best part of £5k on a home cinema projector, you should partner it with as good a quality screen as you can afford. For the W5800 I’d recommend a neutral gain screen at least 100 inches across. 

The W5800’s premium optics are also crying out for the highest quality sources you can get your hands on, so treat yourself to a Panasonic UB9000 4K Blu-ray player or, if that’s beyond your budget, a UB920. Both of which deliver excellent picture quality and can take advantage of the projector’s HDR10+ format. 

A good quality streaming device such as an Apple TV box or Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K is highly recommended too, and I’d suggest putting together a surround system with a decent receiver and Dolby Atmos speaker package. Or, if that’s too much trouble, at the very least go for an excellent full surround soundbar package such as the Samsung HW-Q990D or JBL Bar 1300.