For years, I’ve lamented my inability to fit a 100-plus-inch screen into my tiny Victorian terraced house, much to the anger of two key groups.
The first is a very small, but vocal community of Australian readers who have repeatedly told me to “just build a bigger house”.
I’m not going to even get into the semantics of how a journalist’s stipend and the realities of London real estate make that a rather ridiculous solution.
The second, infinitely more reasonable, group usually asks if I’ve considered an ultra-short-throw (UST) projector. And I have a lot of respect for the suggestion.
For non-techies, UST is a category of projector that companies, led by Hisense and its Laser TV and Laser Cinema lines, have been trying to sell as a valid, at times superior, alternative to traditional TVs for quite some time.
And look, on paper there’s plenty to get excited about. They offer a big screen, 100-plus-inch viewing experience that doesn’t require a cavernous amount of space and can be discreetly placed in any lounge without completely dominating its fengshui. Plonk them right next to the surface you want to project onto, and boom, you have a giant home cinema experience. At least that’s the idea.
And I will fully admit, I have been tempted many times over to take advantage of their perks. But, despite more time spent in our testing rooms reviewing them than I care to count, rewatching our standard suite of test discs, over and over and over again, it wasn’t until last year that one successfully made its way into my house.
And there were two big reasons for my reticence. The first is a simple one; they’re a faff to set up. Many models have supposed “auto calibration” modes, which are meant to adjust the projected image to fit onto the screen, or wall, if you’re a philistine. But to date, I’m yet to find one that works off the bat, and almost always have to do fiddly manual corrections to get them up and running.
The second, more serious point, is to do with their picture quality, specifically their black levels. As I said in a previous opinion piece, there are inherent reasons a projector, UST or otherwise, can’t match the perfect black levels of the LG C2 OLED set up in my lounge – the main one being they make an image by projecting light over an area, where OLEDs charge individual pixels on a panel.
But, USTs have a record for being particularly guilty of one of two sins. First, attempting to overcome their naturally imperfect blacks by boosting the contrast to extreme levels, creating the illusion of deeper blacks at the expense of dark detail. The second is ignoring the problem entirely, letting dark scenes retain detail, but look distinctly grey as a result.
And for years, I’ve argued I’d rather have a smaller screen with better picture quality, and forego a UST because of these annoyances.
With that in mind, you probably think I’m about to say I changed my mind and welcomed a UST into my home because I found a model that fixed these issues, but that’s not the case.
No, I just decided to make a go of it out of necessity. I just turned one of the spare rooms into a study/”man cave” and didn’t fancy the idea of lugging a TV up three flights of stairs, the dimensions of which mean even a 55-inch set would have required my wife and me to re-enact an iconic scene in Friends, involving the word “pivot!”
Yes, I welcomed a Hisense PX3 into my cave because I’m lazy and no longer convinced my middle-aged back would survive the ordeal of getting a heavy TV all the way up the stairs into my converted attic. And you know what, I regret nothing.
I love OLEDs and the perfect blacks they bring, and the PX3 definitely suffers from both of the typical UST flaws I outlined above, but since taking the plunge, the charms of a 100-plus-inch viewing experience have grown on me. So much so that I’ve started favouring it as my go-to option over the C2 in some instances – including the impromptu bad movie nights I have with friends every few months.
With a four person sofa in the same room and a JBL Bar 1300 Dolby Atmos soundbar system handling sound, the home cinema experience just feels more fun when the group and I decide to watch every Leprechaun film we can find back to back, or indulge in a cult classic (most recently Phantom Of The Paradise) over a few beers and a takeout, to blow off steam.
No, the picture isn’t as good as an OLED, yes, I have a royal faff whenever someone knocks the cabinet it’s on and I have to adjust the settings again. But the extra real estate and experience of using a projector just adds a piece of cinema magic you can’t replicate with a standard-sized TV, period.
Sitting in a group, laughing our hearts out after a hard week, watching (spoiler warning) the random environment scientist wandering the plains at the end of Birdemic reveal “it was global warming all along”, is just more fun. Trust me. I’ve done the research…
Which means, hand on heart, I have to admit I was at least partially wrong and will concede to the sea of readers who’ve disagreed with me over the size vs quality debate. While I still maintain there’s a baseline I won’t go below for picture quality, and I will watch movies I care about on an OLED by choice, size does matter more than I previously thought, at least for me personally.
Truthfully, I am as happy as a pig in mud having the PX3 in my home for more casual, movie nights, or the odd Six Nations game, where the source doesn’t necessarily need ultimate quality to be enjoyable (trust me, most of the B-movies we watch look wonderfully budget, no matter what you watch them on).
MORE:
These are the best projectors we’ve tested
We rank the best OLED TVs
Our picks of the best Dolby Atmos soundbars
