Epson EH-TW5300 Full HD 3D Home Projector – Review

Fancy a cinematic experience at home? Well, you could get a bigger Television or you could get your own projector at home. Let look at the Epson EH-TW5300 projector and check if it would be a suitable buy for a home setup for a cinematic movie, TV or gaming experience. The Epson TW5300 is a full HD LCD projector that is 3D capable.

Design and Hardware

The Epson TW5300 has a relatively small dimension. You need not have a dedicated space for it. You could just pull it out of the cabinet and place it on a table to start projecting the content on a wall or a screen. It has a glossy finish with smooth curvy edges. The air cooling vent is on the left. The lens is obviously on the front. It has a cover along with zoom, focus rings. At the back you would find all the ports. It has 2 HDMI port, 1 VGA, 1 USB 2.0 and a RCA composite port. One of the HDMI port supports MHL by which you can directly connect a mobile with a MHL cable.

The projector lamp is capable of 2200 lumens of brightness and it claims a contrast ratio of 35000:1 which is never heard of, for a projector in this price bracket. The projector supports 3D playback and it converts the regular 2D content into 3D content, if you don’t have a real 3D file to play. It comes with 2 active 3D glasses and they can be charged with the bundled cable. It has a has a speaker built-in. The speaker is decent, but I would recommend an external speaker system for a better experience.

Set up

Setting up the projector was a very simple and straight forward process. I got a wall cleared and found a table of suitable height. I connected the HDMI cable with my laptop and the projector was up and running. I also connected my set-top box HDMI cable to it. Then after switching on the projector, the perspective of the projection was nearly perfect. I adjusted the keystone settings and the perspective was perfect. I also zoomed the projection out to have the largest possible projection on the wall. So I was up and running in less than 15 minutes.

Home Theater

The lamp was very bright and it lit the dark room with its brightness. I switched to Eco mode and the brightness was reasonable. However at day, though I had the blinds closed, the full brightness gave a good viewing experience. The settings are all available on the menu. The menu can be accessed with the physical buttons on the projector or use the remote. The remote was compact, but it lacked back-lighting, which is very crucial in any home theater experience. Luckily I had my universal remote to replace it.

The menu have a plethora of settings for themes, picture mode, sound mode, color calibration, etc… I played around with the settings to adjust the contrast and get a deep contrast picture quality. Otherwise, I left everything else to the default setting.

Picture quality

I have two movies to check the picture quality: 300 and Avatar. 300 and Dark Knight are movies which are set in dark backgrounds with wonderful picturization. While watching 300, I noticed that the black levels are not that great. The dark backgrounds looked grayish. I tried adjusting the settings to get the right contrast, but it was not possible to get an optimal setting. On the other hand while watching Avatar, the projector brought out the best colors out. The color reproduction was natural and the clarity was stunning. The colors and details were good both under dark room conditions and ambient light room conditions. This Epson projector has its strength in bringing out the colors, details and image sharpness.

3D viewing experience

I tested the 3D capability both by watching Avatar in 3D and also watching 2D version of Avatar, converted to 3D by the projector. True 3D content was truly amazing to watch with the active 3D glasses. However the converted 3D content was darker and not appealing. However the dark image went on to give better black levels, which the projector lacked in normal viewing mode. Though this is not a work around, the 3D glasses appear to improve the color reproduction marginally.

Noise

Overall, the movie/content watching experience was pleasant with a few minor shortcomings. Another point to note is the noise from the cooling fans. The projector can get really hot and really noisy, which is a disturbance. But with a projector, such a con is expected. Under eco-mode the fan noise was a bit reduced.

Verdict

The Epson EH-TW5300 projector is available in the market for around Rs 65000-73000. If you are looking for a home projector solution for all your content consumption, especially gaming requirements, you must definitely consider the Epson EH-TW5300. It has a plethora of connectivity options.  It has its good looks and decent performance and it is priced well.