I’ve reviewed a few projectors in the last year, and they were all aimed at home users.
Today I’m looking at the BenQ LH730 Conference Room Projector ($1,299, ), which is aimed squarely at businesses and schools.
It is an interesting projector for what it does, and for what it doesn’t do.
What is it?
The LH730 is not a small projector. It measures 16.5 inches x 5.2 inches x 11.3 inches and it weighs 11.7 pounds.
I wouldn’t call it portable, but you can move it from room to room, if needed.
It is really designed to be hung from the ceiling in a meeting room or classroom. In fact, the labels of the ports on the back are set up to be read when the projector is upside down.
The LH730 has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels and a max brightness of 4,000 lumens, which makes it bright enough to use in a room with windows or lights on.
The DLP light source uses four LEDs. It has red, green and two sets of blue LEDs for added brightness. It has a 500,000:1 contrast ratio.
The combination of lens and light source can show an image up to 300 inches.
It has two HDMI ports, two USB ports, one specifically for an optional Wi-Fi dongle, an Ethernet jack for remote control applications, and an RS-232 port.
The projector has a single 10-watt speaker which works fine for a medium-sized room, but if there is an audio-out jack to connect to a larger sound system.
Maintenance free
I work in a university environment with plenty of classrooms that have ceiling-mounted projectors. Getting to them for maintenance is a pain. Cleaning filters and changing bulbs is something that needs to happen from time to time.
The LH730 is a maintenance-free projector. It has a sealed lamp that doesn’t get dusty and it has a lifespan of 20,000 hours at normal brightness or 30,000 hours in eco mode.
This projector is designed to be able to run 24/7, which makes it perfect for always-on installations, perhaps for a lobby of an office building or in a hospital or airport where there is activity all day and all night.
This is the big difference between the LH730 and projectors designed for home use, which have limits to how long they are recommended to be used each day.
In use
The LH730 is designed for business use. It has 98% Rec.709 LED Color, which is a fancy term for really good color reproduction, but the projector’s video modes will tell you this isn’t meant to be used in a home theater.
The available preset modes are bright, presentation, spreadsheet, video conference, infographic and two presets you can tailor to your needs. Cycling through the modes is as easy as pressing the OK button on the remote. Nice touch not having to go into the menus to change modes.
There are two very useful buttons on the remote – Freeze and Eco Blank.
Freeze pauses whatever is on the screen. This is handy for you to pause a presentation on the current slide and do other things on your computer screen that you don’t want visible on the projector. When you’re ready to resume, press the freeze button again to continue.
Eco Blank is an alternative to turning off the projector. It just sets the screen to a black image until you are ready to resume.
The video can display in HDR10 (high dynamic range) if your content is compatible. I set up my laptop with the projector to play the Dallas Cowboys game side by side with my TCL 4K TV and it was very watchable, but there are definitely better choices for a home theater projector.
Some reviewers complained about a rainbow effect (red/green/blue flashes) during video playback, but I didn’t see any rainbows during my video testing.
The projector has a fan to keep the insides cool, but it didn’t ever get loud enough to be distracting.
Set up could not have been easier. Plug it in, press the power button on the projector or on the remote and you’ll be asked to set your language preference and the it’ll start looking for a source.
I should mention I set up the projector sitting on a small table in my living room. The image out of the box was upside down. BenQ is assuming I had the projector ceiling mounted. I had to find the menu option to change the orientation to show the image correctly. It wasn’t difficult, just worth noting.
I plugged my MacBook Pro in via HDMI and the screen appeared on my wall in less than 5 seconds. The image was easy to adjust using the menus (for digital changes like squaring up the edges) and via the zoom and focus sliders on the lens.
Conclusions
The LH730’s maintenance-free operation will make IT departments happy. The 24/7 availability is a nice feature if you need it.
It is a nice-looking projector that is easy to set up and tailored to presentation users. Heck, it has a preset video mode for making spreadsheets more readable. You have to love that.