BenQ TK800 True 4K UHD HDR Home Entertainment Projector, DLP, 3000 Lumens, HMDI, Football Mode - White/Blue

Product Information

Projectors are the ultimate source of winning some beautiful moments at home with your kids and family. You can grab some amazing movies and can sit with your kids to enjoy the best family time. The sharpness of the image is undoubtedly helped by the single chip nature of this projector, which means there are none of the alignment issues found on three-chip machines. However that does mean that the TK800 has to use a color wheel, and this can result in rainbows for certain people who are susceptible to the effect. The projector features Football & Sport modes yielding crispiest sounds that’ll surely life-like action giving you a feel like you’re sitting in the stadium. Sport Picture Mode renders realistic skin shades, warm wood tones, and vivid reds with balanced green and blue for stunning big-screen projection of fast-paced indoor sports action on wooden courts. And Sport Sound Mode accentuates the announcer's commentary and clear acoustic details of squeaking sneakers, referee whistles, and scraping skates in an indoor arena. Like the HT2550 it has a Brilliant Color function that can be turned On or Off (no incremental scale of 1 to 10 as on many DLP projectors). Turning it off reduces lumen output by about 55%.

The BenQ Tk800M is almost as same as the TK800 but with minor upgrades. Zooming Pixel Performance and Adjustable Sounds are some of its best features. Just like the other one, it produces amazing 4K images on the screen. The colours are vivid, bright, and sharp ensuring great on-screen quality even in well-lit ambient rooms. For the purpose, the BenQ TK800 is the best home projector for various entertainment purposes like sports, movies, picture show, and gaming. BenQ market the TK800 projector as a home entertainment and sports model and not a home cinema machine. This means that it is designed to work at its best in normal living rooms with light coloured walls and ceilings and some ambient light. Or you could even use it outdoors shining on to a white sheet or the side of your house for a World Cup party. It is supposed to create an image ‘good enough’ to enjoy big screen sporting events, or gaming with your friends and is not a critical home cinema viewing device for movie viewing in a bat cave dedicated theatre. It’s a product designed for a market that probably doesn’t really fit with your typical AVForums home cinema fan, but it does a decent enough job of what it sets out to do and at a reasonable price point. If we had tested the BenQ as solely a home cinema model for critical movie viewing it wouldn’t score well at all, given that niche set of image quality points it would need to hit, but this isn’t one of those projectors and doesn’t pretend to be. In that case you’ll want to look at active cables that have a signal booster built into the cable, or a fiber optic HDMI cable (also active) that can work up to 150 feet and more without issue. The problem is they’re both more expensive than passive cables, although the prices have been coming down. They’re also unidirectional, so if the cable isn’t working, turn it around and you should get picture.Adding on, another important thing to keep in consideration is how well the design blends with your room’s aesthetics. Keeping the design in mind, both these designs are fine and okay. The main selling point of the BenQ TK800 is that it supports 4K and while this is true, it’s worth pointing out that the projector’s DLP chip is not 3840x2160 pixels. It uses XPR technology, which essentially takes a 1920x1080 pixel DLP chip and flashes the image four times in incredibly fast succession to create an image with a perceived resolution of over eight million pixels. Amazingly this actually works, and even with test patterns the images appear to be 4K in terms of resolution. There isn’t any lens shift on the TK800M (to compensate for projector placement being off-center), so be sure your ceiling mount is properly aligned. If you need to angle the projector slight up (or down) at the screen the BenQ has keystone correction but, as with any projector, only use it as a last resort. It can add artifacts in to the image.

Switching to 1080p content on Blu-ray stands up better to image scrutiny and we also used some streaming services in HD and 4K to further test and in the majority of tests the BenQ TK800 puts up a commendable and colourful performance that is likely to impress the intended users. BenQ also state that the TK800 has auto HDR optimised colour rendition technology which matches the content to the native capabilities of the projector, to try and give a bright and more colourful image, over normal HD material. However the TK800 will only get close to the HD Rec.709 colour standard and nowhere near the current DCI-P3 gamut being used by Hollywood on UHD Blu-rays and the like within the Rec.2020 container. This means the projector is not wide colour gamut compatible, it will display UHD Blu-ray and other wide colour material in the Rec.709 HD standard. So again, it is worth cutting through some of the marketing to get to the actual performance parameters. Rec.709 done correctly is perfectly fine for this projector and the price point; it can look stunning when done correctly, we just feel BenQ need to be a little clearer on the specifications and less vague with the marketing.

BenQ TK800 Performance

Contrast is rated at a respectable 10,000:1, while a
new colour wheel with 'ultra-precise' red, green and blue coatings – and brightness-boosting white elements
– claims an impressive 92 per cent coverage of the REC.709 colour space. Comparing the TK800 with the second HT2550 test sample, each does better than the other on some performance issues, and they tie on others. Both focus sharply from edge to edge across the screen, for example. The TK800's, measured brightness uniformity is better compared with either of the HT2550 test units, perhaps due to manufacturing variance, though as noted earlier, these differences were meaningless in daily viewing.

The TK800 doesn’t carry a native 3,840 x 2,160 set
of DLP ‘mirrors’, but can manipulate these mirrors fast enough to deliver two pixels from each mirror for every image frame. This, in conjunction with proprietary Texas Instruments processing, delivers a 4K effect that’s hard to distinguish from native 4K. This PJ doesn’t give you the sort of beautifully extreme HDR performance a good TV can. But BenQ’s nifty light management delivers at least a taste of HDR’s advantages without the picture becoming unbalanced; it's not too dark, too short of shadow detail, or too peaky with its colours. In fact, far from feeling like a compromise, the TK800’s HDR images often deliver genuine ‘wow’ moments. Good stuff, considering the asking price. There’s a typical set of connections at the rear, that includes two HDMI inputs: the first is HDCP 2.2 compliant and should be used for any 4K/HDR sources, while the second is HDCP 1.4 and can be used for high definition. There’s also a PC/VGA input, an analogue audio in and out, a 12V trigger, an RS232 serial connector, and two USB ports. In the case of the latter, the first is for service updates, while the second can be used to power other devices. The designs aren’t bulky at all and that’s why fit quite nicely in any room, nook, or space. Summing up, the design of the projector doesn’t matter much while choosing any of them as the design doesn’t have to do anything with the performance. Image Quality and Projection

BenQ TK800 Features and Specs

Throw range defines the picture quality from a certain distance and this is where both the models vary a little. The TK800 features about 1.2x zoom whereas the other one features 1.1x zoom. Even the PJ's sound performance is reasonable.
The 5W speaker – and resonant sound chamber it’s housed in – deliver a clean, well-rounded soundstage. There’s a dollop of bass, and the sound projects some distance from the chassis, although inevitably it still doesn’t seem attached to the screen/pictures. Another alternative is the Optoma UHD60 which, like thBenQ, uses the same approach to create its 4K images and also supports HDR. This single-chip DLP projector boasts almost exactly the same features as the TK800 but way more expensive, thus proving once again that the BenQ really is a great value proposition. Verdict Just like other light bulbs, the light source of the projector will ultimately wear out some time and you’ll have to replace it. On a typical note, a light source should ensure about 2000hrs lifetime.

HDMI Bandwidth. This projector has two HDMI ports. The first is HDMI 2.0 / HDCP 2.2 compliant with a bandwidth of 18 Gbps. The second is a standard HDMI port with bandwidth of 10.2 Gbps. Brightness. The BenQ TK800 is rated at 3000 lumens compared to the 2200 lumens of the HT2550. As is typical, this projector has an exceptionally bright factory calibration, called "Bright," which is greenish in tint and for the most part not recommended for video presentation unless you don't mind a green picture. It also has presets labelled Vivid TV, Cinema, Sport, and two custom adjustable User modes. Also, you can opt for the User Mode that let you preferably adjust the EQ algorithms just as you prefer. BenQ TK800 vs BenQ Tk800M – Our Takeaway Input Lag: Input lag at 44 ms on the TK800 is slightly faster than the 50 ms on the HT2550. This is fine for most casual gaming, but serious or professional gamers may want a faster unit since many 1080p projectors can get down to 16 ms. However, they are not 4K projectors - 44 ms is about as fast as we've seen on 4K models; only the PX747-4K beats the TK800, but only by one at 43 ms. Testing was done with a Photo Research PR-650 spectroradiometer, a Konica Minolta LS-100 luminance meter, and CalMAN 2018 calibration software. HDR patterns were from Diversified Video Solutions’ UltraHD/HDR-10 Test Pattern Suite. SDR patterns were from a VideoForge Classic generator. I used my 100-inch Stewart GrayHawk 0.9-gain screen. When testing, a numerical DeltaE value is used to indicate how close to perfect a measurement is. A DeltaE of 1.0 or below is considered perfect as any difference from reference is indistinguishable. 3.0 or lower is excellent and it is hard to see a discrepancy without scrutiny, while above that value any variations become more perceptible. The Cinema picture mode was used for all testing as it had the most accurate grayscale and color.Even without a dynamic iris, the contrast levels of the BenQ lead to some nice shadow detail while exploring in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I’d still recommend keeping the curtains closed while the sun is out if you need to search for important items in dark corners, but for general play the TK800M performed admirably. You can witness un-matched clarity and crispy voice-quality that let you get the best of the details so you won’t miss any beat ever. As such it scores a reasonable 7 out of 10 as a portable home entertainment and sports projector - because it does that role very well. Whether that market needs faux 4K as opposed to ‘just’ a 1080p model is a question for the intended end user to think about and decide on. There isn’t anything ‘wow’ in the design and both look as fine as any other projector in the market. They are designed with a whitish plastic having round edges with some teal blue details on the front.