Epson’s TW700 scared us a little in tests.  However, in the end it wasn’t as bad as we thought.  Despite the excellent results of its Home Cinema predecessor, the TW600, we were forced to ask for two models from the manufacturer and even to change its lamp  just to be sure we had optimal results.  Luckily, we found the solution to the problem and it’s informative to take a look at the box to your right.

First of all, let’s take a quick tour of this product.  On top, there are very practical adjustment dials for positioning the image on the wall.  On the back, there are numerous connections but with one drawback: the absence of a second HDMI input.  This may seem unimportant, however, with a Blu-Ray/HD DVD player, PS3 and Internet box, connectivity needs quickly add up, in this case to three HDMI connections.  The remote is, as usual with Epson, massive but it does have all the necessary shortcuts for good control of the projector in a few clicks.

And with good settings, what is the result?

It’s actually quite nice.  Despite its incapacity to differentiate between extreme blacks on our test card, the TW700 functions with lighter tones in movies and manages to display details in darker sequences.  In color gradations, although we have seen better, it controls shimmering without totally eliminating it.  One very appreciable point is that settings by default in the Cinema 1 mode aren’t too flashy.  Some projectors make orange into red to liven up images which isn’t the case here.  Color fidelity is good and close to what the ideal projector (we represent this with a screen shot in the Product Face-off page) would produce.

Finally, we are going to go astray from our usual procedure and not go into the office use aspect.  Instead, we bring up the following question:  should we opt for this 720p projector rather than a full HD 1080p model like the Panasonic PTAE-1000E or its big brother, the EMP-TW1000 ?  If the financial aspect is disregarded, our opinion is simple: choose the full HD.  It represents a jump in quality that is particularly noticeable in the matrix and which is starting to resemble that of LCD screens (in other words, almost invisible).  Otherwise, there is a high price associated with HD, sometimes 4 times the amount, that isn’t justified.  Consequently, our current recommendation is to stick to this mid-range projector which already offers fine performances.