Projecting an image of quality with Benq’s W1300

BENQ’S W1300 is a quality 1080p projector that includes 3D.

BENQ’S W1300 is a quality projector but if you are thinking of family nights in watching Gravity in 3D you will need to pay extra to achieve lift-off.

The W1300 is aimed at the home-entertainment market and uses DLP colour-wheel technology. The advantage of well-­executed DLP is excellent sharpness and a wealth of detail from good source material such as Blu-ray movies.

The W1300 delivered on this score, which helps make a big-screen movie or game all that more immersive.

The problem with DLP is that it can produce an annoying rainbow-colour fringing effect. Some people are more susceptible than others to this, so it may pay to try the W1300 in-store before buying it. I saw some fringing but it didn’t bother me.

The W1300 is well designed as a living-room projector. The case is compact, build quality good and the manual lens shift dial lets you tweak the picture angle.

There’s also a 1.5x optical zoom for even more picture-placement control.

Projectors have a bunch of disadvantages compared with a big telly. They are more finicky to set up, the super-bright lamp can be intrusive in a living room, they take time to warm up and warm down, and projectors require a darkened room to work at their best.

The upside is that a projector can go really large on screen size at a fraction of the cost of a giant TV.

The W1300 costs $1199 and throws a sharp, punchy picture big enough (more than 80 inches, or 203cm, diagonal) to take out the wall in my modest entertainment room. I’d be paying upwards of 10 grand to get the same screen size from a TV.

Super screen size can turn a movie or game from a mere diversion into a serious reality escape and the W1300 adds 3D capability to help with the illusion.

3D has not become the must-have living-room entertainment feature many thought it would when the technology debuted on TVs five years ago but, on the right movie, 3D does come into its own.

I watched Gravity in 3D on the W1300 and for a couple of hours I felt I was in orbit along with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.

Using 3D on the Benq does wash out the picture somewhat but the extraordinary depth and the odd 3D trick shot, such as when an errant bolt from a space repair job comes spiralling out of the screen, make up for the lost punch.

Unfortunately, other than the likes of Avatar and Gravity, there just aren’t that many great 3D movies. It’s a technology well suited to big-vista sci-fi, fantasy films, animations and the odd war epic, but not much else. The downside with 3D on the Benq W1300 is that, for a number of technical reasons, it uses the ­active-glasses system, rather than passive 3D.

This means the glasses are battery powered and much clunkier than the lightweight glasses used in passive systems.

They are also expensive compared with passives, at $99 a throw. You get just one pair in the box, which means a family of four is up for another $300 to enjoy 3D ­together.

The W1300 has all the usual ports around the back, including a pair of HDMI inputs, which is what most people will use these days for hooking their video ­sources to the projector.

While the projector is aimed more at the home market than the corporate one, business users will like the laser pointer in the ­remote.