I’m looking forward to the review of the just formally announced BenQ HT9050 4K UHD home theater projector.
The HT9050 is their new flagship, with list price of $8999.
In many ways similar to the HT8050, the HT9050 offers much more for the extra $1000, including a long life LED light engine, and the addition of support for the larger BT2020 color space offered with 4K UHD content such as Blu-ray UHD.
Let’s start with the LED light engine. BenQ rates it as having a 20,000 hour life.
The press release didn’t specify brightness, but I believe it will be the same 2200 lumens claimed as the the lamp based 8050. Thanks to the solid state light LED engine, though, it’s likely to seem brighter, and definitely will stay brighter longer.
This BenQ claims 50,000:1 contrast. It uses a dynamic iris to get there. Based on my looks at the HT8050, the black levels should be very respectable on the HT9050, with the added ability to turn off when black frames are present. The screen photos below were taken with the older HT8050, they look really good, but remember, this new BenQ will have the benefit of BT2020 color intensity, and the LED light source, that it’s little brother lacks.
The HT9050 will do an even better job on scenes like this from Ghostbusters (taken using the 8050), thanks to the extended color space it offers.
There’s a healthy amount of lens shift to work with the manual 1.5:1 zoom. That makes for pretty good placement flexibility overall, and a lot better than most of the other 4K UHD projectors hitting the market.
This BenQ projector is a pixel shifter - a DLP projector that uses a 2716x1528 matrix, firing once at the screen and then firing a second time shifting a half pixel diagonally. Combined, that’s 8.3 million pixels, which meets the standard for 4K UHD (which is lower than what we call true 4K, which relies on much smaller pixels that don’t overlap, and therefore can resolve more detail).
That said, these new 4K UHD projectors look very sharp, even if they can’t produce quite as fine detail.
Extremely sharp image! Definitely click to enlarge
The base warranty is 3 years parts and labor. The release did not mention what additional coverage might be on the LED light engine. We will, of course, note that in the upcoming review of the HT9050.
