BenQ W1070 1080p Full HD 3D DLP Projector Review

When it comes to home cinema size really does matter and nothing beats the excitement you get from watching a movie the way it should be seen - on a projector. However, what if you're ready to take that next step up to a projected image but your budget is a bit tight? Well, frankly there has never been a better time to dip your toes into big screen waters, with some well specified projectors hitting the market at prices that would have been unthinkable just two years ago. Recently we reviewed Optoma's HD25 1080p 3D projector, which offered an impressive level of performance for a mere £795. We barely had time to consider the implications of that before BenQ's new W1070 arrived at our doors, with the promise of a similar level of performance for an incredible £699. In terms of specifications, the W1070 appears to offer many of the features we found on the Optoma, including single-chip DLP, 1080p resolution, 3D capability, a colour management system, a claimed brightness of 2,000 lumen and a claimed contrast ratio of 10,000:1. The W1070 even has a lens shift, which is highly unusual for a budget DLP projector. That's certainly an impressive list of specifications but at such a tempting price, is BenQ's W1070 just too good to be true?

Whilst BenQ are keen to emphasise the W1070's home cinema credentials, there's no escaping the projector's data grade heritage. It uses a two-tone chassis that is similar to many of BenQ's other budget projectors but the manufacturer has tried to cater for the home cinema market with a solid plastic construction and more attractive design. The result is a projector that certainly wouldn't look out of place in a living room and despite its small size it feels weighty and well-built. In terms of dimensions, it measures 312 x 104 x 244mm and it weighs 2.75kgs. There is a large exhaust vent on the front left, with an intake grille on the right hand side of the chassis and a built-in speaker, betraying the W1070's data grade legacy. As is often the case with budget projectors there is also quite a lot of light spill through the exhaust vents and the W1070 is fairly noisy, especially in Normal mode. There is an access panel at the top for changing the lamp and a rubber lens cap to keep out the dust, although using it will require re-focussing.


The lens is offset to the right and is quite small and cheap but then at this price point you really couldn't expect anything else. There are manual zoom and focus rotary controls which can be accessed at the top of the projector but we found them to be a real pain to actually use. Unusually for a budget DLP projector there is also a lens shift control which is also at the top, under a sliding cover. The control is adjusted using a screwdriver and whilst the amount of shift is only small (about 10% up or down), it certainly makes installation easier. The W1070 has a limited amount of optical zoom and has clearly been designed to be used in smaller rooms, which makes sense. There is a foot at the front that can be used to angle the projector upwards and tone at the right rear that can be used to angle it down slightly or level the chassis. However if you do angle the projector, don't be tempted to use keystone adjustment as the scaling will rob the image of detail. At the top rear of the chassis there is a basic control panel, just in case you lose the remote control.


All the connections are at the rear and it's a fairly standard selection for a modern projector - there are two HDMI inputs, a VGA connector, a component video input, a composite video input and unusually these days a S-Video input. Since there is a built-in speaker you also get 3.5mm audio in and out jacks, along with a L/R stereo input. Finally there is a mini-USB port, a 12V trigger and an RS232 connector for system control, along with a three-pin power connector. We found that the W1070 could be a little slow at HDMI handshaking but it didn't have any problems locating all the attached devices.

For some strange reason, despite aiming the W1070 at the home cinema market, BenQ has included a tiny and frankly hopeless remote control. Not only is it too small to easily use, unless you're a child or a little person, but the button layout is unintuitive. For example the menu button is at the top left hand corner above the navigation buttons, whilst the button for blanking the screen is at the bottom left hand corner. So not only was the menu button hard to locate when setting the W1070 up but we often found ourselves blanking the screen by accident. There is also no backlight, making the remote even harder to use in the dark. BenQ provided a perfectly adequate remote control with the W1060, so we don't understand why the W1070 has been saddled with this lame duck.


It would seem that whilst most other manufacturers are making their glasses smaller, lighter and with minimal tint to the lenses, BenQ has gone slightly retro and not in a good way. We haven't seen a pair of 3D glasses this big or heavy in some time but since the lenses are quite dark, if you ever get bored of 3D they could double as welding goggles. We found the glasses to be quite heavy to wear for long periods of time and they can't be folded up, making them difficult to store; in addition, they use two batteries for some reason. On the plus side their large size means they can fit comfortably over prescription glasses, whilst the frames and sides are effective at blocking out ambient light. Just like with the remote control, we feel a redesign might be in order when it comes to the 3D glasses. We should point out that the W1070 doesn't come with glasses included, so they will need to be bought separately.

The W1070's menu screens are rather small in size but at least they're simple and effective, consisting of six main pages, the first of which relates to the projector's built-in speaker. The Audio menu contains controls for muting or turning down the volume of the built-in speaker. We suspect you'll never use the built-in speaker and recommend turning it down to zero, rather than using the mute button - unless you want a mute icon on the screen. You can also turn on or off the power on/off ring tone, again we recommend turning it off as it gets annoying.

The next menu screen is System Setup: Advanced and here you can change the lamp settings, select the HDMI settings, change the baud rate, choose a test pattern to aid setup, turn on quick cooling, select the high altitude mode, set a password, turn on the key lock, reset all the settings and access the ISF controls. In the case of the ISF setting, it doesn't provide any additional calibration controls, it just allows an ISF certified calibrator to enter a password and create locked ISF Day and Night presets.


The Display menu screen allows you to select the appropriate aspect ratio (Real is the best choice for high definition content), keystone adjustments (avoid), the screen position (only available with a PC signal), overscan (again avoid using), PC & component YPbPr tuning, digital zoom, film mode (leave on), 3D comb filter and the 3D submenu. In the latter you can select the 3D mode, Auto is best, and 3D sync invert. The Picture menu screen contains all the important controls relating to picture quality, including the preset mode (Cinema, Dynamic, Standard, User1/2/3, 3D, ISF Day/Night), brightness, contrast, colour, tint, sharpness, colour temperature and lamp power.


From the Picture menu screen, you can also access the Advanced submenu where you'll find the clarity control (which is a noise reduction feature), the colour temperature fine tuning (a two-point white balance control), you can select the gamma curve, turn the BrilliantColor feature on or off and access the colour management system (CMS).


Since the W1070 has ISF certification, that means it has to have certain calibration controls available, as well as lockable Day and Night presets. It is certainly encouraging to see BenQ offering proper calibration controls like a two-point white balance and a full CMS on a projector at this price point. Especially as some manufacturers can't include a CMS on projectors that are four times the price.

The W1070 offers a number of presets, of which Cinema is the best out-of-the-box choice. It defaults to a Gamma of 2.2, which is our preferred target but interestingly it also defaults to the Normal colour temperature setting rather than Warm. We chose the Real Aspect Ratio setting, optimised Brightness and Contrast for our environment and found that the middle setting for the Sharpness appeared best. We also set the Clarity Control to zero and made sure that BrilliantColor feature was off because this just over-saturates the colours.


As you can see from the RGB Balance chart above left, the Normal colour temperature setting has too much green in it and not enough red or blue. As a result there were some sizeable DeltaE errors, with images in general and whites in particular showing a slight green tinge to them. If you look at the CIE Chart on the top right, you can see that white is skewed towards green and away from its target of D65. Aside from a dip at 10 IRE, the gamma curve was tracking quite closely to our 2.2 target. The inclusion of a two-point white balance control should allow us to correct the greyscale. In terms of the colour gamut, most of the colours are overly bright in terms of luminance and red, blue and yellow are also over-saturated in terms of colour. The biggest problem appears to be a sizeable error in the hue of green, along with some under-saturation, which might be difficult to correct even with a colour management system.

The W1070 has three user modes available and a User Mode Management feature in the Picture menu that allows you to select the preset that you want to use as a reference and rename the user mode. We used the Cinema preset as our starting point and then tested the different colour temperature settings to see which was best. We found that in order to change the colour temperature setting, we had to turn the BrilliantColor feature on and then turn it off again once we had made the change. Whilst we already knew that the Normal colour temperature setting had too much green, we soon discovered that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Warm setting had too much red and the Cool setting had too much blue. So ultimately the Normal setting appeared the least inaccurate and we used that as a starting point before adjusting with the two-point white balance.


As it turned out calibrating the greyscale was quite easy, all we needed to do was drop the green gain control down a few notches and the results were basically perfect. As you can see in the RGB Balance chart above, all three primary colours are measuring in equal amounts at our target of 100. As a result the errors are all below one, there was no discolouration in the greyscale and white was hitting the industry standard of D65. The gamma curve was also measuring at our target of 2.2, apart from a slight dip at 10 IRE and a slight bump at 90 IRE. Overall this is an excellent greyscale and gamma performance from a projector at this price point.


The inclusion of a colour management system is great news as it allowed us to improve the colour accuracy considerably. We were able to get the luminance measurements spot on for all the colours, which is a good start as that is the element of colour to which our eyes are most sensitive. We also managed to get all the hue errors below the tolerance level of three and the same for the colour measurements of red, magenta and yellow. There was still an under-saturation in green and an over-saturation in blue that we were unable to fully correct, which in turn affected cyan. Unfortunately, this under-saturation in green appeared to be a limitation of the W1070's native colour gamut but most of the colours were hitting their targets for Rec.709. However the overall errors were all at or below the threshold at which our eyes can distinguish errors. When watching normal content, greens were perhaps slightly muted but overall this is an excellent colour performance from a budget projector.


We use the saturation sweeps to look for issues that might not present themselves at 100% but could be apparent at less saturated levels such as 25, 50 or 70%. Overall the W1070 performed very well, with blue, cyan, magenta and yellow all tracking close to their targets. Unsurprisingly given that it was under-saturated at 100%, green was also under-saturated at 75 and 50%. Perhaps more interestingly, despite being spot on at 100%, red was under-saturated at all the lower measurement points. However, there were no hideous errors lurking at the lower saturation points and overall this is a good performance from a budget projector.

If there is one area where DLP projectors tend to struggle it's black levels and as a budget model the W1070 was no exception. We measured the black level at 0.07 cd/m2 which might seem low but when actually viewed appears like a dark grey rather than black. We also noticed some slight unevenness to the image when looking at a 0 IRE screen, which is not uncommon at this price point. BenQ claim a contrast ratio of 10,000:1 for the W1070 but once calibrated, it actually measured closer to 900:1. However on the plus side, once the brightness control was set correctly, the shadow detail was actually quite good.

Rather surprisingly for a budget projector with a data grade history, it wasn't that bright as we were expecting and in the Economic lamp mode we were only getting around 900 lumens. If you switched to the Normal lamp mode, the brightness increased to 1,100 lumens but it was still a long way from the claimed 2,000 lumens. In our blacked out test environment, the Economic lamp mode was bright enough, giving us better looking blacks and allowing us to use the Normal lamp mode for 3D content. If you're using the W1070 in a room with white walls or ceiling, you might want to use the Normal lamp mode, as the added brightness will be useful and the fan noise doesn't increase by much. There is also a SmartEco lamp mode which tries to improve the blacks and perceived dynamic range by adjusting the brightness depending on what's on screen. We found this feature resulted in crude jumps in brightness and increased noise, so it's best avoided.

The W1070 performed very well in these tests and was able to fully reproduced the SMPTE colour bar tests for both PAL and NTSC, correctly scaling the full 576i and 480i images without any loss of detail or unwanted ringing. The video deinterlacing test was also good, although on the motion adaptive deinterlacing test the projector introduced some jaggies. However it had no problems in resolving all the fine brickwork in the detail tests on both the PAL and NTSC discs. On the film detail test the W1070's performance was good and in the cadence tests the projector correctly detected the 3:2 (NTSC - USA/Japan) format as well as the 2:2 (PAL - European) format. The projector also had no problems displaying mixed film material with scrolling video text and was able to reproduce the text without any shredding or blurring.

The W1070 performed well in the tests using high definition content and with the player set to 1080i, the projector correctly deinterlaced and displayed both the video and film resolution tests and showed good scaling and filtering performance as well as good resolution enhancement. With 1080i material the projector had no difficulties in showing video text overlaid on film based material and also handled 24p content without any problems. The one area where the W1070 fell down was the Dynamic Range High test showing video levels above reference white (235) up to peak white (255). This test revealed that the W1070 was clipping all three primary colours and white, thus losing detail above video level 235. Whilst it would be nice to be able to see all the way up to peak white, because otherwise you might lose some detail in bright whites, it isn't a problem and certainly wouldn't adversely affect the projector's overall performance.

We have reviewed a couple of BenQ projectors recently and whilst they were reasonably good, they lacked the performance levels needed to really be considered suitable for home cinema. In terms of picture quality therefore the W1070 is a major improvement, delivering some genuinely impressive 2D images, especially when you consider how much it costs. As we have often mentioned in reviews, the greyscale is the single most important element, forming the backbone of any decent image. Thanks to the reference level of accuracy in terms of the greyscale on the W1070, it had an excellent base on which to build an impressive picture. There was a smooth transition from black to white and no discolouration or other artefacts, resulting in some very pleasing images. Thanks to the inclusion of a CMS, the colours also appeared very natural and whilst the greens were slightly muted, that was preferable to being over-saturated. Despite the cheap and rather small lens, the use of a single-chip design meant that images had plenty of detail once you'd managed to focus the W1070 correctly. Motion handling, another strength of DLP, was also excellent with smooth and judder free movement and no smearing, blurring or loss of detail on pans. As you might expect, 24p content in particular had both great detail and lovely smooth motion. However, thanks to the excellent video processing, standard definition content also scrubbed up nicely and overall the W1070 delivered the goods.


Of course it isn't perfect and the mediocre black levels mentioned in the test section meant that dark scenes sometimes suffered. However, whilst the W1070 might struggle with absolute blacks, it performed very well when showing dark and light within the same scene, delivering a great intra-frame contrast ratio. This is another strength of DLP and is often overlooked when people talk on/off contrast ratios or absolute black levels. The surprising lack of brightness did limit the dynamic range somewhat, so the W1070 will struggle to light up a big screen. The major problem with single-chip DLP projectors are flashes of colour or rainbows, artefacts caused by the use of a colour wheel, to which some people are susceptible. If you're one of those people then the W1070 might not be for you. Overall though, the W1070 was able to produce some lovely images and when watching recent Blu-ray purchases like Les Miserables, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, we were pleased to see clean and detailed images that were free of unwanted noise, banding or other artefacts. Instead the projector did a great job of reproducing the high definition images and at times we needed to remind ourselves just how cheap the W1070 actually was!

Whilst there are numerous pros and cons when it comes to DLP projectors, the one area where they have a clear advantage is 3D. The faster response time of the DLP panels results in 3D images that are completely free of crosstalk and as such, the experience is far more enjoyable. Of course there are many other factors that contribute to good 3D but nothing can ruin your three dimensional fun more than excessive crosstalk. Once we had got over the ludicrous glasses, the W1070 proved to be a very competent 3D performer. Aside from the absence of crosstalk, the motion handling, image detail and colour accuracy were also very good, resulting in some impressive 3D. Another added bonus of watching 3D on a DLP projector is that the dimming nature of the glasses tends to improve the perceived blacks and minimise rainbows.


We've said this before but you can't beat a projector when it comes to 3D, the experience is just far more immersive when watched on a screen large enough to fill your field of view. A TV just can't cut it, unless you go for huge screen sizes and then you're into silly money. No, when it comes to bang for buck nothing beats a projector and the W1070 offers more bang for its buck than just about projector out there. We watched a number of 3D Blu-rays on the W1070, including Life of Pi, Dredd and Silent Hill: Revelation which was directed by AVForums supporter Michael J. Bassett and they all looked great, with plenty of depth and effective dimensionality. Our only complaint was that the W1070 didn't seem to deliver the kind of brightness we were expecting from a BenQ and the rather dark lenses on the glasses didn't help. In fact, as with the similarly priced Optoma HD25, we found that although the 3D performance was very good technically, it didn't quite wow us as much as we thought it would.

BenQ W1070 1080p Full HD 3D DLP Projector Review