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The 3,200 ANSI lumen rating for the TK700 is enough to fill a 260-inch diagonal, 1.0 gain 16:9 screen in a dark room, according to Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations. Using the lower brightness Game mode, the image was easily enough for a 90-inch 1.0-gain screen in a dark room, or an 80-inch screen in a family room at night with lights on. In the daytime with the same 80-inch screen and light streaming through windows, the image was watchable, but washed out. For audio, the onboard 5-watt chamber speaker delivered sufficiently high quality to be usable at high enough volume to fill a small to medium size room. For better quality, you can connect an external audio system using the 3.5mm audio out port or the one HDMI port that offers audio return.
It can’t be stressed enough, though, that these response times on a projector are very novel indeed, and given this is a projector with native 4K you’re not going to find better than this performance at the moment. All but a small number of inveterate competitive gamers (or dyed in the wool pedants) are going to notice any input lag. Basically, you’re probably not going to get better performance than this. Rivals have the W1800 beaten when it comes to HDR, brightness and contrast, then, but you’ll struggle to find another 4K projector at this price that delivers a more natural, cinematic image. The BenQ TK700 is a very competitively priced, high-lumen gaming projector with excellent input lag suitable for today’s fast-paced gaming. Its performance will allow users to game on the big screen without breaking the bank. This short-throw projector requires at least two metres between the projector and the wall to reach the 100-inch mark, and while the TK700STi advertises a 100-inch maximum, we found that it could retain a perfectly viewable picture at 120-inches on the wall. In concert with its 3,000 lumens brightness – which is about as bright as you’ll want to get in a home environment – the 4K display is remarkably crisp and vibrant, thanks to its HDR10 support.The projector also has a relatively short throw of 1.3:1 with the zoom control at full, giving you a 100in picture at a distance of only 2.5m. The only worrying spec is a maximum brightness of just 2,000 ANSI lumens. BenQ W1800 review: Price and competition Prices valid in stores (all including VAT) until close of business on 28th November 2023. (Some of these web prices are cheaper than in-store, so please mention that you've seen these offers online.)
User picture mode uncalibrated is 99.6% as bright as Bright picture mode and HDR10 picture mode is 99.2% as bright. The TK700 utilizes a lamp based light source and Texas Instruments 0.47-inch DLP chip. Any single chip DLP projector has the potential for showing rainbow effects, but fortunately, during my time with the projector, I did not experience any in any content that I viewed. Of course, 4K projectors that use the 0.47-inch DLP DMD are not true native 4K. They actually utilize 4-way XPR (Expanded Pixel Resolution) pixel shift at 240Hz to take the DMD's native 1920x1080 resolution up to 8.3 million pixels on screen. The projector does accept a 3840x2160 resolution signal and it's actually quite sharp, to the point where only those with the keenest eyes would likely be able to see it is not native 4K.The brightness limitation means the BenQ isn’t the best projector for use in brighter rooms. It is usable with some ambient light but it’s undoubtedly at its best in a darkened room. But there’s more to picture quality than brightness, as I’ll get to in a minute. Regardless of your preferred mode for movies and video, Game mode is the obvious choice for gaming, both for the better shadow detail—the faster you can see what's happening in the shadows, the faster you can react to it—and for its state-of-the-art short lag times for projectors. My Bodnar meter timed the input lag for 4K 60Hz input at 17.0 milliseconds (ms). For 1080p, the lag was 16.9ms at 60Hz, 8.5ms at 120Hz, and 4.3ms at 240Hz.
For home entertainment, and for gamers who want to move up to a big-screen 4K HDR image and the shortest input lags available, the BenQ TK700 can be a solid entry-level projector. If rainbow artifacts are an issue for you, however, be sure to consider the Optoma UHD35 instead, which offers slightly higher brightness along with essentially the same input lag times, and did a better job of avoiding showing the red-green-blue flashes in our tests. Featuring super-high brightness at 3200 ANSI Lumens, the TK700 is ideal for use in ‘normal’ living room light levels. This means you get vivid, dynamic colour, without having to draw curtains and blinds. It’s the colours that swing it for the W1800, though. Not only did this projector slightly exceed Rec.709 in testing but colour accuracy is fantastic by projector standards, with an average Delta E of 2.89. Its only serious rival here is the Viewsonic X10-4K and that’s slightly more expensive.Among the other notable features of the TK700 is 3D, which is actually very bright when triggered, though the projector does not offer any control to increase or decrease the 3D effect. Also, the TK700 includes BenQ's LumiExpert, which is useful for automatically adjusting perceived brightness by tweaking the gamma based on the ambient light in the room. This feature may prove useful if you place this projector in a multi-purpose room such as a living room that has a fair amount of ambient light that changes throughout the day or you like to watch with different levels of room lighting at different times. The next game I wanted to try was Gran Turismo 7 on PlayStation 5. This game also required a small amount of time to adjust to the difference in latency, though it took less time than with King of Fighters. Unfortunately, GT7 does not have a 120fps mode. While running the game in its 4K/60 HDR mode I found that my breaking was slightly off when going around corners. Outside of that everything else virtually felt the same as when played on my OLED. This was another game that was displayed beautifully on the projector with rich and vibrant colors, great HDR, and pure immersion. Another treat playing at 100 inches in HDR.
Brightness Uniformity. The TK700 projecting a 100-inch diagonal image resulted in measured brightness uniformity of 75% while in wide angle zoom, and 80% in telephoto zoom. The brightest portion of the screen was the middle bottom sector, and the dimmest the top left. The difference in brightness on a full white screen was not noticeable, nor was it noticeable in viewing of normal content. Two other things surprised me. One is that the TK700 has onboard sound and that it’s actually sound worth using. There’s no stereo separation, which is going to be an issue in many action games, but there’s plenty of volume and what’s there sounds decent, with a strong low end and respectable detail. I happily played Destiny 2 and Elden Ring without plugging in headphones or a soundbar and had disgruntled family members demanding that I turn the volume down. For viewing 1080p SDR movies and video, Game mode delivered nicely saturated color and acceptable color accuracy. When viewing in a dark room, it delivered good contrast and a sense of three-dimensionality in both dark scenes and more brightly lit scenes, along with almost all of the detail I know to look for in the shadows. It also maintained the dramatic visual impact that the dark scenes were designed to deliver. Users who would calibrate will be glad to know you can get a fairly accurate picture with the controls given. The controls provided within the projector are your standard fare of 2-point grayscale controls and CMS (color management system) to adjust RGBCMY primary and secondary color points. These same controls are available in HDR picture modes as well. Grayscale can be dialed in nicely, though given the gamut specification, color can't be dialed in to fully cover the Rec.709 color space, and there's no support for WCG (wide color gamut) for HDR. Users who are looking for an affordable, well-performing projector capable of taking advantage of the newest current-generation gaming consoles but have always been on the fence about projection gaming will be glad to know that this is a very suitable solution—assuming you can work around or live with some of the TK700's limitations.Zoom Lens Light Loss. The TK700's light loss when shifting from the widest zoom ring position to its longest telephoto ring position was 16.1%. HDR calibration for grayscale had similar results. Where HDR calibration will suffer though is in the CMS due to being limited to Rec.709 color space. The second is that the high brightness levels make the TK700 usable in daytime. Sure, you lose some contrast, making it hard to make much out in the murkier dungeons of Elden Ring, but otherwise all is fine. What’s more, the projector is still usable in the Smart Eco setting, which doubles the Normal lamp life of 4,000 hours without reducing the brightness levels to a daft extent. The TK700 did a decent job with shadow detail and highlights in SDR. In HDR it didn't fare as well as I would have hoped; note that the TK700 does not offer any type of dynamic iris to assist with dark content. Motion was excellent however in everything I demoed while using it from games, to movies, and test patterns. This projector does not have any motion interpolation features, which makes perfect sense considering it is a gaming projector and to get the best performance when it comes to input latency you would want all of that turned off. So it's nice to see it has such good motion on all types of content without the need of such features.
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