GREAT GAMING PROJECTOR?!?! – BenQ X500i Review – 4K OR 1080p 240Hz DLP Short throw!

Not that long ago, the term “gaming projector” would have been considered both setup and punchline for a pretty funny joke. Spending thousands for an undeniably sub-par gaming experience isn’t exactly an option worth shouting about, but with this, the BenQ X500i, it might actually be worthwhile compared to an awful lot of TVs – especially if you have the space to go big with it. Even for pretty regular sized rooms you can get considerably larger than TV sized screens – you only need about 5 feet, or 1.5 metres, between the projector and the wall to get a 100 inch screen – or if you’ve got room to spare, 8 feet or about 2.4 metres gets you a whopping 150” frame. You can’t beat that with a TV! 

The X500i has a rather impressive set of specs. This is a true 4K projector that BenQ claims is specifically made for gaming. This should output up to 2,200 lumens – that’s about 650 nits, which for a projector is pretty decent, from its four LEDs. If you were thinking this has RGBW, you’d be wrong. Apparently this is RGBB, to, according to BenQ, “enhance colour saturation, resulting in vibrant and lifelike imagery”. We’ll see about that… It’s also meant to cover 84% of the DCI P3 spectrum, which while not amazing compared to a bunch of gaming monitors these days, is pretty great for a projector. You also apparently get a 1350:1 contrast ratio, which again for a projector is pretty decent. The fancy feature of this is its ability to scale the refresh rate depending on the resolution. With almost every other display, the maximum refresh rate is all you get, regardless of if it’s running at 4K or 144p. This, however, will run at 4K60, OR 1440p120, OR 1080p240! Yeah, this does 240Hz at 1080p, and it’s legit. 

Before I show you the high speed footage I do want to note that this flashes like mad (and I’ll explain why in a second) so if you are photosensitive, this is a big warning to skip ahead. Right, here’s that clip. You can see the frogs moving every 4 frames – that’s around 4 milliseconds, or right around 240Hz. It is genuinely running at 240Hz, and the response times are instant too. This is amazing.

The reason it’s flickering so much – and why I can’t use it for too long – is because this is a 4 LED DLP projector. Let me explain. Not all that long ago, projectors used both a filament-based bulb and a liquid crystal panel to display their images. The bulb sucked. It ran insanely hot, it wasn’t able to get super bright, and it needed replacing regularly. So, we replaced it with an LED. That was smaller, much more efficient, often brighter, didn’t need replacing, and was just a much better option. The LCD still sucked though – see LCDs can’t block out 100% of the light that shines onto them. We see this with monitors all the time – especially with IPS panels – where without local dimming the panel is visibly grey when it should be fully black. Now imagine a 2000 lumen LED shining through the LCD… Not great! So you get a terrible contrast ratio, which means images look washed out, and you never get close to the deep blacks you’d want for really appealing content. So, with Larry Hornbeck of Texas Instrument’s help, we created DLP – digital light processing. DLP projectors could reasonably be called micro-mirror projectors, because the DLP chips are just that. An array of microscopic aluminium mirrors on top of a silicon machine. It’s a type of chip manufacturing called MEMs – micro-electro-mechanical circuits. This is a really cutting edge field where you can design mechanical devices at micrometre scale. In this case, that’s an array of 8.3 million tiny mirrors that sit on top of an electro-mechanical circuit that can move each mirror independently to reflect different amounts of light for each pixel. It’s truly insane, but it means that the projector can get a much better contrast ratio, and has functionally instant response times too. 

As for the reason why this thing flickers, well there is only one rather expensive DLP chip in here, so those red, green and double blue LEDs take turns to display the component parts of the frame, one after another. It’s the same way a plasma display works, flashing one colour’s worth of the image, then another, then another, and your brain does a wonderful job at smushing those together to give you a complete frame. That does mean that none of my usual display analysis tools work properly – the SpyderX2 just outright doesn’t work, and my very own response time tool… Well technically speaking that did actually work, and I’m really impressed. 

The results aren’t all that useful – a lot of them failed to process, somewhat understandably, but because the tool is agnostic to light colour, it still gives us a somewhat usable output at least to understand what the projector is doing. At 1080p 240 hertz anyway, you get functionally instant response times – in one colour anyway. There won’t be any ghosting – much like an OLED – but of course the full colour of the frame is spread out evenly between the frame time. That does mean, at least as far as I’m aware, adaptive sync doesn’t work here. It’s very much fixed at the refresh rate it is set to. 

Still, I can’t argue that this is an incredible gaming experience. It’s remarkably smooth, and being able to run at 240Hz makes for a pretty fast gaming experience. Even playing fast paced games like Siege worked incredibly well and felt amazingly immersive. While I would imagine more local-multiplayer games, or more story driven games might make more sense for this kind of setup, the fact that basically any genre plays incredibly well on this shows how good it is. 

One thing BenQ highlights both on their specs page and in the reviewers guide is the input lag – or lack thereof. Funnily enough the comparison table they included they purposefully round up on the competitor projector, despite it otherwise being the same result. Anyway, what they are saying here is that their projectors have one frame of input lag depending on the refresh rate you select. Luckily, since OSRTT is so well designed it can actually test this! The results I got were between two and three frames at 240Hz, which is only the slower side for a gaming display, but for a projector is really, really impressive. They do say in a warning popup that, for the best results, you should not use any digital zoom or keystone corrections. I’m not using digital zoom, seeing as this has a zoom lens fitted anyway, along with manual focusing, but I am using keystone corrections for my rather temporary setup, so that might be adding some delay. I ran the input lag test again and found that, yep, with no keystone corrections, the latency drops to the claimed around 4 millisecond range. It seems your mounting position is going to be an important choice here.

I should mention that the X500i has two HDMI 2.0 ports on the back, alongside a USB C port for DisplayPort input – plus a hidden mini HDMI port in this little cubby, for the included Android TV box. This is a rather interesting choice, because essentially this means that you can replace this Android TV box with a newer one when it inevitably stops getting feature and security updates, or otherwise becomes too slow and laggy to want to use – instead of it being built into the projector, essentially dooming the projector along with it. I think I like this design choice – and the fact that it comes in the box is good, rather than what seems to be commonplace of nickel and diming you at every step. I should also mention that you get an RS232 Serial port on the back for control, with a fully documented control scheme, or if that isn’t your style, you can just use the included remote. That’s a rather sleek affair with light-up buttons, and works as both a controller for the projector, and as a remote for the Android TV box. The projector has IR receivers on the front and top, so it should pick up your inputs from anywhere you want. Lastly I should mention that this has two 5W treVolo speakers built in, which sound pretty good – although really if you’re spending this much on a projector I’d hope you have some good quality external speakers to use instead.. 

While there is plenty more we could talk about with this, I’d recommend you to check out some more seasoned projector reviewers who are more likely to have the right equipment to test and measure how good this thing truly is, and how it compares to its competitors. I can tell you that this is one hell of an experience though. The colours look vibrant, rich and do offer a decent amount of contrast – it’s no OLED of course, but it’s on par with a good IPS panel for sure. The image is beautifully sharp, or at 1080p 240Hz it’s incredibly smooth and responsive, and that combination of options makes it an incredibly impressive bit of kit. BenQ expects you to shell out around £1,500 for this bad boy, which if you are comparing this to a lot of new TVs, that isn’t all that insane a price point, and you have to admit that it’s a rather unique experience that, at least in some areas, a TV just can’t match. Now personally I still think I’d rather have a QD-OLED TV instead, especially one with a good game mode, but if you don’t mind sticking a projector screen up for a 100” TV setup, this might not be a bad shout.