Epson Home Cinema 705HD Projector - Physical Tour-2

Click to Enlarge.So close

While Epson is using the same physically shaped remote control, it has some different buttons.

From the top:

The Power button is a small orange affair on the top left side of the remote control. You press once to power up, or twice to power down. Across from it (to the right) is a button labeled Search. Pressing it will have the Epson projector search the inputs and select the first active source it finds. Directly below those two buttons are six direct "source" buttons, including Computer, S-Video, (composite) Video, USB, HDMI, etc. That means you can take the memory card out of most digital cameras and plug it right in to the USB adapter.

The next row has three buttons, from the left, an A/V mute (mutes picture, and also sound, if you are feeding sound into the projector, which does have a speaker). The middle button freezes the image on the screen. The right one has no function (more on this below). The next row has (from the left) Auto (the projector sets up the image for you), Aspect ratio, and Color Mode (which lets you toggle between the many picture modes). Gone from last year's remote is the numeric keypad, used for things like security including locking the control panel - basically the type of feature not needed in a home projector.

There's also a green button with a ? on it. This brings up Epson's interactive Help system, as discussed on the first page of the review. It's a nice touch, as instead of just answering questions it lets you make the actual changes without having to leave the help system. I've always liked it, but at the same time, it's rather thin, in terms of the areas of help. It would be much better if expanded to cover more topics, but it's more interactive help than any of the competition offers.

Below the Help button are the Volume up and down buttons.

All that leaves are the menu controls at the bottom. There's a small round Menu button to launch the menu system, and across from it, on the right, is the ESC button to take you back one level in the menus. Right below these two, you'll find the classic navigation system in an oval pattern with up/down/left/right arrows and an Enter button located in the center.