Performance
As you can see, the BenQ W2700 that I own is a very different beast. It’s a much more premium looking design in my opinion, and a very living room friendly design. The W2720i looks a bit brutish in its textured black finish by comparison.
I’m not going to take down my ceiling mount to review this new one though, as putting it all back is frankly a massive hassle.
However, they do share the same throw ratio, so I’ve popped it on a table directly below it, and I’m happy to confirm this worked perfectly.
There’s a built-in alignment image you can access on the remote, allowing you to confirm it’s all straight. The W2700 featured bright green lines while this one is black and white, and honestly, the green lines of the older model were much easier to see and align. Ignore the “no signal” thing at the bottom, silly my didn’t realise the remote for the new one had also turned on my own BenQ projector and both were shining for these first few images; whoops!
Once powered up, it was immediate to me that the W2720i is very quiet, my W2700 isn’t exactly a noisy unit, but this new model is still a heck of a lot quieter. Thanks to the LED light source generating less heat, the fans don’t have to work as hard.
While there is some keystone and 2D correction on offer, it’s still best to get it optically aligned, but it’s good to see the option is there should you need it.
The AI Cinema, because everything has AI now, is actually quite clever. It takes a quick snapshot of the screen, adjusts a few settings to give you a better picture, and you’re ready to rock. It worked well for me, but will it work for everyone or every time? It’s hard to say, but it takes literally two seconds to try it, so why not.
Because mine came with a built-in dongle system, there’s basically a full Google TV configuration on hand, with all the usual apps and features you might expect. Obviously, if you’re just hooking up a blu-ray player or your Xbox, you can get the non-i version without the dongle and save yourself a few quid.
The thing that strikes me the most is the brightness, and as you can tell from the curtains behind my screen, it is the middle of the day. However, despite this, the screen is as bright during the day as my W2700 is at night. It’s a strikingly vibrant and bright image.
The contrast is excellent and while I only have what is (in all honesty) a cheap pull down screen with a 1.0 gain and no ALR, the black levels are rather fantastic; further enhanced by the contrast of the brilliant brightness and clarity of the white levels.
Colour is jaw-dropping with no banding and no fringing on contrasting colours or lines. Obviously, any banding you may see in these images is coming from image compression, but in real life, that blue was as vibrant as a clear summer’s day.
Colour accuracy is really good, it feels very bright and vibrant when it needs to be, and the colours have great depth too. Actually, the colours look more “cinema” than my DLP projector, which tends to have more saturation with its out of the box settings, while the W2720i looks warmer and more accurate out of the box; I should hope so too, given it’s about 5 years newer technology.
With its 4K HDR support, image quality just pops from the screen, and while it can do larger screens, 100″ is hardly small. Sitting on my couch while the room is filled with the world of James Cameron’s Avatar is a sight to behold. On my current projector I wouldn’t watch HDR content without blacking out the window first, but with the extra brightness of the W2720i, it was absolutely usable in a dimly lit room.
Overall, it really felt like a faultless experience, it handles motion properly, with it able to set to a proper 24 frames for movies, while still supporting both 60 and 120Hz mode for high frame rate content and gaming.
It has great image scaling, fantastic contrast, brightness and colours for any content I threw at it.
Superb colour accuracy, and an easy-to-use feature that allowed for quick and easy calibration should you need it.
