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Projectors have a lot of downsides compared to TVs. They're hard to find space for, a pain in the butt to align, and they look downright awful in a bright room. So, why are they so popular? I mean, there's dozens of brands making them, and they've got to be the number one most advertised item on teu.com. Well, it's because people love them. They are by far the cheapest way to get a giant screen. And there's a natural softness and cinematic quality to the image that can make even your iPhone home videos look like absolute cinema. But how much do you need to spend on one? Probably more than $2, but we're going to try that one anyway. And we're going to go all the way up to $20, $200, $2,000, $20,000, and even all the way to a $200,000
option. All in search of the sweet spot. Now, I'm not going to show you this one just yet, but what I will do is show you the $15,000 lens that goes in it. DAMN BOY, HE THICK. Meet LED projector. It claims to be the most costefficient highresolution LED projector. And when it's $2, I kind of believe them. It is the bare essentials to make a projector. that makes it a lamp with a lens that directs light through an LCD layer and then through other optics that reflect out onto a screen. However, it has a surprising number of other features. For example, we have HDMI in, USB in, as well as a micro SD card slot, an AV input,
headphone out, and we can power it via a USB cable, micro USB, but a USB cable nonetheless. You can even adjust the zoom. However, it doesn't disclose its brightness. It only has a contrast ratio of 800 to1. And as you're going to see, it really stretches the definition of HD. My expectations are pretty low, but probably not low enough. I feel like any light in the room right now is going to be crippling. Um, you might be surprised. I might not. Is it even on? Hit the lights. Advertised as an HD projector. That ain't no screen door. That's a chain link fence. I can see everything.
You can see the sub pixels. You can see like the red, the blue, and the green. It's crazy. We should probably, I mean, at least put it in the center. Let's give it its best shot, right? Uh, hey. Yeah. Hey. Okay, cool. Here we go. I can't wait to use my projector for book. Adam, I can't read the YouTube book. Look, it's it's literally Oh, you can kind of get it there. Kind of. Can you believe they have the audacity to give this a book mode?
The moon is square, Adam. It's constantly so bad. And somehow the image quality was better during that moment. I know, right? So that I could just make it up into the music in my mind. In fairness, nobody would be trying to use a projector of this caliber at 120 in. No, no, not even close. We should look at it at like, you know, 40 in. Like where you'd set it up in your tent when you're camping or something. Okay, let's move it closer. You know a projector is quality when I can look directly into it and not be bothered whatsoever. Like I can still totally see. All right, hit it. As anything more than a toy for kids, I just can't recommend this. Which is good
because it's priced as one. T. Want an affordable phone plan that doesn't compromise on coverage? T has plans up to $25 a month. It's easy to switch and easy to use. Just head on down to our link and start building the right plan for you today. At $20, we have the LED projector. Yes, it is the $20 projector because the only way you're getting it for $2 is if you can get it on sale as like a Teimu promo. What? Sorry, you thought we were going to watch it again. Even at $20, it's still a toy for kids, guys. But the good news is that to get something that's not a toy doesn't cost as much as you might think. The Nexco PJ40 Pro is a 1080p
projector and is perhaps our first serious entrant in this video. It has 800 ANC lumens of brightness, a 3000 to1 contrast ratio, and supports HDR10, like the bare minimum. It's got two HDMI ports, two USB ports, AVN, and a headphone jack. For goodies, we get built-in Wi-Fi with Android TV and an included backlit remote. Also, this thing's got a 20 watt speaker in it, so you don't need to hook it up to another sound system. Nexo claims that the projector is good for screens between 50 in and 300 in depending on the distance that you mount your projector. And its LED lamp is rated for 30,000 hours of operation. That's like 3 hours a day for 30 years. Though, note there will be some brightness degradation over that
time. You also get some really important features for setting up your projector like automated and manual key stinging as well as manual zoom. Huh? You even get a spare filter for your fan. Wow. It's not perfect cuz it isn't. Nothing's perfect. No, but at the price it might be perfect. Do you think it's 10 times as good? Oh, yeah. Like obviously you can see that it's not like the best lens. When you look at the corners, you see like fringing as well as stuff that's out of focus.
Sure. But you're how you're not looking at the corners all the time. It might be that we did just look at a $20 projector, so we're feeling really stoked, but I don't see why you would be unhappy with this, especially if you have a light control room. It's loud. It's quite loud. Yeah. And we are seated directly underneath it, as we would be, though. Now, press the home button. It even has its own built-in smart OS. It comes with Android TV. It's pretty responsive. To be clear, it was these guys who very recently talked about how the smartification of your TV is not necessarily a feature because of all the advertising that's built into it. But if it's going to have it, if it could be responsive, that'd be great.
And it supports CEC, so you can bypass the OS to just boot directly to the input you want. It's pretty cool. I will say setting it up did suck. It is manual focus. There's no zoom. Um, and it's all manual height adjustments, no fun features, so it's kind of a pain. But at $220, am I happy with this? You're damn right. Yeah. Should we game on it, though? Sure. Cool. I'm calling it now. This is going to be the biggest bump we see in image quality for 10xing our budget. And 10xing our budget was only $200 this time. Wow. Oh, dude. This is so usable.
You can definitely see ghosting on a lot of the quick movements, but it's not that distracting. I'll be honest with you, as the person playing the game, I didn't really notice it. Yeah, I'm specifically trying to look for these things, but I'm not looking where you are. I'm just like, what is what do the textures move like? And does it feel responsive? Feels fine. Yeah. Not bad at all. This seems like a great entrylevel option. Oh, yeah. I don't remember the last time I was this impressed by a value product.
I'm wondering if your impressions will change when we go to our next step where we have an actual gaming projector. Going up to the $2,000 price bracket, we get to meet our first specialty projector, the BenQ TK710 STI, which has an unfortunate final acronym, is a laser gaming projector that's also short throw. What makes it a gaming projector? Well, it can support 1080p at 240 Hz or 4K at 60 Hz. If you're thinking, "That's a little strange. This came out in 2025. If it's going to really be a gaming projector, it should at least do 4K 120, right?" Yeah. You know what? That's a good point.
Is this like an HDMI limitation? Yes and no. While this only has HDMI 2.0 ports, it also makes use of something called pixel shift to get that 4K image. What is pixel shift? Okay, we're going to have to do a lot of explaining here. The lasers from the projector bulb go through a DLP or digital light processor. The core part of this DLP is a DMD, a digital micro mirror device. This is a chip of tiny aluminum mirrors, one for each pixel that can electrostatically change angles to direct light towards or away from any given pixel, controlling brightness. That light is then reflected through a color wheel, which filters out or
enhances the color of light before it heads out of the rest of the optic chain. But getting more micro mirrors is really, really expensive. So, they pull a little trick. They take your 4K image and process it into subframes. typically two or four. These subframes consist of different pixels that will all constitute a full 4K image. By adjusting the angles of your micro mirrors, you can fill in the extra pixels faster than the eye can see, allowing for measurable and perceivable increases in clarity. Those 1920 x 1080 mirrors can switch at 240 hertz, making three additional pixels at 4K60 or making a 1080 image at 240. Very cool. And that's basically the only way a projector can get 4K at a
reasonable price. Now, let's talk about the other specs. The TK710 STI gets 3200 ANC lumens with a quoted 600,000 to1 contrast ratio, and its laser phosphor light source is rated for 20,000 hours at full brightness. And naturally, as a gaming projector, they quote very low input latency. We don't get motorized zoom or focus, but we do get manual zoom and focus. You know, not bad. It helps. It's nice. Okay. And we get a third hidden HDMI port for a built-in Android TV stick that kind of is jankly installed in the back of it. It's kind of weird. But does all that fancy tech amount to an image that's worth the leap
in price? Something we didn't mention is that once we move into this price range, we start to get a lot more features and a lot more options on our lens. For instance, this one supports not only focus, but also zoom and happens to be a short throw model. So instead of sitting above and behind us, it sits on the coffee table in front of us, which yeah, it can be a mixed bag ergonomically. It's um the screen's really big, the room's also really big. We had to make some concessions and there are advantages to this approach. There's no down in front. And if you do happen to want to use the speakers that are built
into it, at least the sound is coming from in front of you. Go ahead and kill the lights, Mr. Ree. Immediately the resolution difference is noticeable. Yeah. So, this does 4K. It isn't true But I with projectors, you can't really tell the difference between a pixel shift. I can't. I've seen people that claim that they can see the difference. I cannot. Yeah. At every price point, I have been really Well, not everyone. At the last two price points, I've been really impressed. This is better than
what we saw, but I think it's probably about two times better than what we saw last. You end up getting a lot of comforts with this, like the zoom lens, the short throw projection if that's something that works for your space. And also, it's so much quieter. Mhm. It does have gaming performance. That's right. It's a it's 1080p 240 Hz, right? So, you could theoretically like play pretty competitively on this. Yeah. At two times the image quality, at least two times the convenience, six times at least, maybe eight times the value here, but maybe not quite 10 times. But we haven't tried the game mode yet. Maybe it has two times the gaming experience.
Let's do it. This is by far the best gaming experience we've had yet. It does give up some image quality switching over to game mode as I tend to expect from a projector, but you more than make up for it in input latency and overall responsiveness. So, how does that affect the price scaling for you then? I'd say it's two times better for gaming again, which makes it maybe eight times better than the last one. All right. Now, here's another big leap. We're going from $2,000 to car money. New car money. That's an important distinction for a lot of people. $2,000 is car money.
Yeah. Yeah, it is new car money. And at our $20,000 price point, we have the JBC DLA NZ900. And boy, this thing is big. It's still a laser projector, but it has a native 4K chip, which means with pixel shift, it can go all the way up to a completely useless 8K. And instead of just having a single DLP like the BenQ, it has three. One for the R, the G, and the B. That means even better color performance and brightness. And thanks to JVC's DILA technology, you get even better contrast, too. Obviously, all of that extra complexity adds up. And this thing's not just 20,000, but it's actually 26,000 and can typically be found for 30,000. But you also get a fully motorized lens that also has lens shift, which allows you to
physically move the lens up and down. So, you don't have to angle your projector to have it fit your screen if your mounting height isn't perfect. This means you don't have to deal with any sort of distorted image and give up any of those precious pixels. The NZ claims a 150,000 to1 contrast ratio, which is a much more modest claim than the Ben Q. Like the BenQ, it uses a laser phosphor light source, but it barely gets any brighter, just 3,300 ANC lumens. But it does support HDR10 plus and numerous other display standards. And it also has a settings menu that you can really sink your teeth into if you're somebody who wants to calibrate and get the best image possible. It's designed for
displays between 60 and 300 in. And God, just look at it. It's it's gorgeous. It's beautiful. But is the image also gorgeous and beautiful? And is it $30,000 gorgeous and beautiful? I'm very excited to see this because I installed that Epson in my home theater ages ago and I told myself it's good enough. I don't need the JVC and then I went out of my way to never view a JVC. It now I'm going to find out how wrong I was. Right. It might you might just it might just spoil you. Look at the contrast. That's really impressive.
It lights Reese. It's so clean. It is such a natural looking image. WOW. Oh wow. And this level of contrast is something that only JVC can do thanks to their DILA technology. They're the only ones who make it. They're the only ones who can do it. To be clear, there are solutions that you can add to other projectors, but at least some of them are so expensive that you might as well just spring for a JVC projector in the first place. Maybe not this one, but they do have lower-end models that do have that same DILA technology. The question is, is it 10 times better than what we saw last? That's a firm no. However, this projector is not intended for a pitily 120in screen. You're supposed to have a
180in screen. And then that is where our lower-end models simply will not be able to achieve a satisfactory result. And this will. Yeah. This thing does 8K. So, we can get 4K120 on this. Looking at this as well as even the $2,000 projector was like the first time I'd really appreciated that difference in like just the picture, the nature of the picture of a projector versus a TV. We've watched a lot of animated content, but when you watch like filmed content, it feels really real. To be clear, the Epson LS12000 still a lot of bang for like a sixth as many dollars, but there's no question this is a better projector. I switched
up our game because I wanted something that supports HDR. Sure. Damn, that's more like it. Does this not feel like walking around in a city at golden hour? Maybe controversial take though. I'd rather game on a big TV than on this. I think that gaming is so focused on modern display technology. Film has that history with the projector that makes it so tied to it. And there's nothing analog about this. Why would I want to use analog technology? Plus, with displays, you can get a nice big super pixel dense monitor that's going to look amazing, have incredible motion performance, incredible like quality, and we'll have even better contrast.
Yeah. Think about how many OLED monitors you could get for the price of this thing. I think this would be a great time to do this side by side. Yeah. Yeah, we should. Let's look back at our $2,000 projector. That is the difference between a 2,000 and $20,000 projector. It is simultaneously such a huge difference and not a huge difference at all. Yeah. I mean, if I never knew that the one on the right existed, I would never have a problem with the one on the left. But now that I see them side by side,
no, it's still not 10 times better. But it's an easy five. Yeah. It makes you wish you had the money. That's what it does. And the best part is we are far from the end of the line. Okay, so pretty much basically everything in the next section of the video was really unsafe. Don't do it. If you find yourself in a room with a professionalgrade projector, don't do what we're doing. Everything in this section is kind of dangerous, but feel free to remind us in the comments. For this one, we needed to change shirts. ltstore.com. This is the Christy Boxer 4K30. And despite its name, it actually is a 4K60 projector. I'm not sure what happened there, but what did happen is
that this thing cost $200,000 new, but that's because this is a professional thing. And among its professionals features a super handy side screen to allow you to calibrate and make sure that your projector looks perfect. And man, it has so many menus. It has settings for settings that you thought you might have been setting, but turns out you actually weren't. It is everything that you would need to make sure that this thing looks perfectly aligned and calibrated in any sort of deployment. It even comes with tools in a handy little tool box that is oh so incredibly organized. And these let you access the service panels where you can tune the internal optics of this. Don't try it yourself. You can really
screw things up. Or you can access the projector bulbs. Yes, bulbs plural. Inside of this beast are six easily removable 450 mercury vapor lamps shining at 30,000 lumens through a 3DLP setup. That means each of these mercury vapor bulbs gets 5,000 lumens roughly, which is brighter than our $30,000 projector. This thing has six of them. It's literally dangerous. That amount of brightness means that you can use this thing in even well-lit rooms, even maybe outdoors, though it's probably not super recommended. However, that brightness does come with some downsides. These bulbs are only good for $1,500, and they cost about $400ish each, so you'll be replacing them a lot.
The good news is that you can run this with just one light at a time. And also, they have these little NFC bits on the back so you can check the exact lifespan of each bulb in its condition. And did I mention that this thing is liquid cooled? Now, you might have expected that for the bulbs that maybe there'd be some liquid cooling, but that's actually not what it's for. It is for the DLP processing chips. And on top of that water cooling, they also have blower fans directed at some of the power delivery stuff. This thing is crazy to get inside. And it's also very, very loud. Let's check it out. Getting ready.
Come when ready. Oh my goodness. You can fit so much projector in this bad boy, Adam. Six bulbs worth of projector. And that's not to achieve a brighter image in our home cinema. In fact, you might have noticed that no matter how much we spent up until this point, all of them were in about the same range for target brightness. It's to shoot a much bigger image at the same optimal brightness level in a light control environment. Yeah, but we're gonna use it in here anyway. We actually had to install special powers to get this running. Look at that. It's like a car charger.
What the heck? How much power does it draw? Well, it has uh six 450 W bulbs in it. Neat. Yeah. I can't wait to be in a room full of that. Oh, yeah. There's no cooling in here. Fun fact, by the way, we borrowed this projector from Tobias, who runs the Vancouver Dome. That's a great video. Yes. And so is the dome. Go watch that, too. We got to put the lens in first, I realize. Right. This kind of stuff makes me feel like I'm in the movie, you know, like put putting in the control. The last control rod before the self-destruct sequence goes.
Can you just put it in, man? I'm scared if you don't want you to drop it. Just like that. So, this has a almost one ratio for its throw distance, which means that we're probably more than 120 in away. So, it's going to be a bit It's going to be pretty big. Okay. You can start directly into it, but I don't recommend it. Oh, I won't. Yeah. Okay, good. We're at that sort of other side where at the very low end of the curve, your creature comforts are very limited and then you get kind of the mid-priced ones that are like very consumer friendly. Now we're down at the other end of the curve where nicities like quiet cooling fans uh go away. Yeah. Usually you build a room for your screen. With this you're building a room for the projector.
You might call it a projection room. M WA BUDDY. DUDE, it's usably bright off of the freaking velvet frame on the freaking projector screen. Yeah, that's supposed to absorb any light that accidentally hits it. Look at this. It's coming off the velvet. Sorry, it's not velvet. It's like a matte black paint, but it's coming off the black paint with usable brightness. That's nuts. You got to see this bit. This blew my mind when I watched it earlier. So bright. That looked like I was looking at actual lightning.
Yeah. And you can hear it. You can hear how bright it is. That's for sure. You sure can. And the content still looks great. The contrast is not as good as the JBC, but this is a much older projector than that. And also, it is really designed to throw huge images really freaking far. Yeah, this is not Christy's latest gen. It was just what we could get access to because we're not buying one. Completely unsuitable for home use for a wide variety of reasons. Yeah, I think it's like 250 lb. And no benefit for a consumer whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah, like I would just prefer the JVC in my home.
Yeah, but it has all these cool features like because it has six bulbs, you can have bulb redundancy, right? Like you can have a fallback. You can run with four B. There's a setting on here. I want to show you. Let's change the brightness. The lamp brightness. It's really funny in this room. Okay, so we're currently at 100% lamp power. Yeah. I'm going to go down all the way down to the lowest setting for lamp power. That's 80%. What? I can't even tell. Can't tell the difference. It might matter when we're like three times as far away. Right. But it just you cannot tell the difference between the lamps being at 180%. No, I really couldn't. This thing's so cool. The lens offset.
Oh, yeah. Oh, wow bud. Right. Because this is designed to sit above 250 people. Yeah. It's meant to be in versatile for many different venues. So, the lens shift is absolutely massive. And this is where you can really see the whole like you can see it's keystone right now, but you can see the edge going beyond that wall TV that we have here. Should we game? Yeah, sure. We can game. Yeah. I'm not expecting it to be very good. But before we do that, it's time for the side by side.
Let's do some comparisons. Once again, can't emphasize enough. Nexigo is the winner for bang for the buck even before I've looked at anything else. Nexigo versus Ben Q. The Ben Q is just plain a lot better. It's just got more brightness, more pop. If you want to go to 120 in, it's worth spending the 10x extra. Let's see. Ben Q versus JBC. Just go step by step. And immediately the color performance of the Ben Q just looks completely inadequate. Yeah. Oh, the bear from the bear. That was so much scarier cuz it was actually dark.
Yeah. Okay, now we pull out the big dog. Okay, big boy's on the right. Here she comes. She'll be coming round the mountain when she I'd rather have the JBC. Yeah. Um Oh my god. But this is why the expression horses for courses. Yeah. This is an utterly inappropriate use case for that Christy projector. And you can see that it shows. There literally is a limit to how much you can spend on a home cinema projector and yield not just a meaningful benefit, but even just an improvement. Mhm. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Christy would be able to maintain its brightness way further away than the JVC could.
Oh, 100% you would. You'd get a way better image on a 100 ft screen on that Christie. Yeah, no question. Pull this away. You can barely tell the JBC's there. It completely overwhelms it. It's like the motion that gives it away. That's pretty crazy. It's so bright. No 120 Hz. 4K 60 is the max it can do. Yep. I don't actually know about this specific model, but I do know that with some commercial projectors from Christie. There are like upgrade modules and stuff that you can augment them with
over time. Uh I really don't know about this one. So, it's possible you can put a better brain in it or a better HDMI input module or whatever else. You were saying what's the maximum number of HDMI inputs this can be converted with? Me, too. I think there's some wonkiness with how it handles uh the color space. I couldn't figure this out. I had some issues watching movies with it, too. But that's the thing about professional solutions is they're designed to be configured, maintained, and troubleshot by professionals. Yep. Not for us. You can change how blue red is in the settings on this, which doesn't make any sense, but it's a thing that matters when you're doing color calibration.
But here's a question. What if we compare the Nexigo at $220 to the JBC at well $30,000? Is it over a hundred times better? Don't you see? Oh, yeah. It's really good. Yeah. It's really, really good. But here's 1080p. It's not HDR. Doesn't have convenient lens shift. It won't do increased refresh rates. It's loud. I mean, it's not as loud as the Christy. Yeah, that's overwhelming everything right now. But also, let's turn the light on. And the JBC will clearly outperform the Nexico in a brighter
environment. But I wouldn't say it's over a 100 times better. I called it at the beginning. I'm confirming it now. Gold medal value award, gold medal raw performance award, and BenQ was there. The one you'll probably buy. You know what else? You might probably buy something from our sponsor, T. There's a good chance you're overpaying for your current mobile bill. We're at a point now where 100 bucks is expected and 150 to 200 isn't even that shocking. If you're thinking, "Huh, I wish there was a wireless option that didn't drive me crazy." Tell omi about it. T offers mobile plans starting at just $5 all the way up to unlimited plans at just $25.
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also go see a show there. Thanks to JBC for sending this over and the rest of them, nobody but no thanks to anybody else cuz we bought all the other ones.
