If you like the idea of wall-filling movie watching, but find the price tags that come with 4K laser projectors are beyond your budget, Epson has announced a bunch of 1080p Home Cinema projectors that come with "best-in-class brightness and stunning picture quality" for under a thousand bucks.
"People crave the big-screen movie theater experience, especially this year as cinemas nationwide had to shut their doors," said Epson America's Rodrigo Catalan. "Epson’s new affordable and easy-to-use home cinema projectors are the perfect choice for families looking to stream must-watch movies, TV shows and sporting events on a big screen from the comfort of their own home."
Like the "Laser Projection TV" projector that Epson announced in September, all of the new Home Cinema additions are built around the company's proprietary three-chip 3LCD technology that's said to offer impressive color accuracy and brightness, while nixing the rainbow effect sometimes seen with other systems. The company doesn't reveal the maximum size of the thrown image for the 2250 and 2200 models, but they both come with built-in Android TV for tapping into streaming services like Hulu and HBO, and include a remote with cooked-in Google Assistant for voice searches.
They each rock a 10-W sound system, offer 2,700 lumens of color and white brightness, sport an HDMI port for connecting directly to a media player, gaming console, streaming device or cable/satellite box, there's Bluetooth included too, and they feature image enhancement and frame interpolation for smooth, sharp images.
The 2250 offers a contrast ratio of 70,000:1, 1.6x zoom and includes vertical lens shift to change the position of a thrown image without moving the projector up or down. This model is priced at US$999.99. The 2200 can manage half the contrast ratio, offers 1.2x zoom and doesn't boast built-in lens shift capabilities – it comes in at $899.99.
Completing the new releases are the Home Cinema 1080 and 880 models, neither of which comes with Android TV included but are reckoned capable of throwing a 320-diagonal-inch projection.
The 1080 puts out 3,400 lumens of color and white brightness, offers 16:000:1 contrast and 1.2x zoom, has two HDMI ports and comes with a 2-W built-in sound system. The price tag reads $749.99. And the cheapest of the four is the 880 model at $599.99, which will get you 3,300 lumens of color and white brightness, 16,000:1 contrast, fixed focus, one HDMI port and a 2-W sound system. These two models don't include Bluetooth.
