The BenQ LH730 projector ($1,299) checks off enough of the right boxes—starting with high brightness—to make it a strong contender for business and education use. Rated at 4,000 lumens, it can deliver a suitably large and bright 1080p image for a well-lit medium or large conference room or classroom. However, it also shows rainbow artifacts frequently enough in film and video that if anyone watching is sensitive to them, they're likely to find them annoying. As long as you don't plan to show anything more than a few short clips in any given presentation, however, the LH730 can be an excellent choice.
Set It (Up), and Forget It
One particularly strong point for the LH730 is that it's essentially maintenance-free. The sealed (read: dust-proof) light engine uses a four-LED light source (one red, one green, and two blue) rated at 20,000 hours in Normal power mode or 30,000 hours in Eco mode. That's long enough to last the life of the projector, with no filters or lamps to replace. Even better, once you've set the projector up, you can leave it on all day, every day, and it promises to keep going without a rest, thanks to support for 24/7/365 operation.
Being maintenance-free is welcome for any application, but is particularly important in cases where the projector is mounted in a location that's hard to get to. Being able to operate without a break makes the LH730 an obvious candidate for applications that require full-time or nearly full-time operation, as with a display in a reception area, for example.
(Credit: BenQ)The LH730 follows a familiar design for a DLP projector. It measures 5.2 by 16.5 by 11.3 inches (HWD), weighs in at 11.7 pounds, and pairs its LED light source—which uses the second blue LED to boost brightness and increase color accuracy, according to BenQ—with a 1,920 by 1,080 DLP chip. Setup consists of little more than connecting cables, pointing the projector at the screen, and adjusting the manual focus.
Connection options are limited compared with some business projectors, including the Epson Pro EX11000, for example. You get two HDMI ports and two USB connectors, one of which is meant for an optional $45 Wi-Fi dongle. Adding the dongle lets you mirror mobile devices and PCs via Wi-Fi Direct. You'll also find a LAN port for controlling the projector over a network, and built-in support for AMX control systems.
(Credit: BenQ)As with most projectors, you can use digital controls—including a four-corner adjustment—to tweak the image shape and size. However, digital adjustments lower brightness and can introduce artifacts in some images, so it's better to avoid them if you can, instead positioning the projector to avoid keystone distortion and using the 1.2x optical zoom to adjust image size. I found it easy to adjust both the manual zoom and focus for a suitably sharp, detailed image for the resolution.
As a point of reference, based on the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, the LH730's 4,000 ANSI lumens should make it bright enough to light up a roughly 230-to-335-inch diagonal, 1.0-gain, 16:9 screen in a dark room. In a typically bright conference room or classroom, it should still be bright enough to fill a screen as large as 160 inches. In my tests, using my preferred settings for image quality—and the lower brightness that goes with them—the projector delivered a comfortably bright image on a 90-inch, 1.0-gain screen in both a dark room and with lights on.
The onboard 10-watt mono speaker offers usable sound quality and volume, but if you need stereo, better quality, or higher volume to fill the room, you can connect an external audio system to the 3.5mm audio-out port.
Top-Tier Graphics, Mixed Results for Movies and Video
For SDR input, the LH730 offers five picture modes. As with many projectors, the brightest mode, Bright, favors brightness at the cost of color accuracy. The green bias is obvious enough to make it best avoided for any content with color images unless you absolutely need the top brightness the projector can deliver.
For presentations that include only graphics and text images, all of the other modes delivered suitably vibrant, eye-catching color in my tests, and most hues in each case were close enough to what they should be that most people will consider any of the modes acceptable.
(Credit: BenQ)For presentations with photorealistic images, you might want to be more selective. I settled on Video Conference mode for my viewing tests for both presentations and movies, because it scored best on both color accuracy and subtle shading for photorealistic images. However most of the other modes weren't far behind on either score, and I wouldn't hesitate to use them if I needed their extra brightness.
The LH730 handled our SDR movie test clips unusually well for a business projector, delivering good color accuracy and good contrast. It also handled shadow detail well, showing almost all the detail that gets lost with most business projectors, while delivering good enough contrast to maintain much of the dramatic visual impact in those scenes.
On our HDR tests, using the 4K HDR versions of the same movies we use for SDR tests, the LH730 down-converted the 4K HDR input to its native 1080p, and automatically switched to its one HDR10 mode. The LH730 also has an HLG mode, which BenQ says the projector will switch to as appropriate. Image quality was much the same as for the SDR versions of the same scenes, except that that shadow detail held even better, giving even more of a sense of three-dimensionality in those scenes and maintaining more of the visual impact.
(Credit: BenQ)Overall, for both SDR and HDR, the image quality was a match for some entry-level home theater projectors—at least for those viewers who don't see the red/green/blue flashes known as rainbow artifacts. Any projector that shows its primary colors in sequence—which includes all single-chip DLP models—can show rainbow artifacts. However, some show them more often than others, and some are more likely to show them in still images, like presentation graphics, while others are more likely to show them in movies and video. With the LH730, I saw almost no artifacts with graphics, but when watching our movie test clips, they were frequent and obvious.
Keep in mind that some people see these flashes more readily than others. For a classroom or conference room, you will tend to have different people viewing at different times, and odds are good that some will see these artifacts and find them annoying. So for business and education use, it's best to avoid models that tend to show rainbow artifacts in the material you want to show, even if you don't see them yourself. If you merely want to include one or two short clips as part of your presentations, the LH730's rainbow artifacts shouldn't be an issue. But if you need to show full-length movies in a classroom, they probably will be.
(Credit: BenQ)For those who need 3D, the LH730 supports full HD 3D using DLP-Link glasses, with a single 3D picture mode. I didn't see any crosstalk in my 3D viewing tests, and saw just a hint of 3D-related motion artifacts, which is typical for current 3D projectors.
If you use an application that needs a short lag time, the LH730's lag may or may not be suitable. I measured it with a Bodnar meter at 33 milliseconds for both 1080p and 4K 60Hz input. For context, most gamers would consider that short enough for casual gaming.
Verdict: A Projector That Won't Quit
For applications that require a projector that's virtually maintenance-free, able to run all day every day without a break, or both, the LH730 is an obvious contender. And the maintenance-free operation with no maximum for how many hours you can use it per day is an attractive addition to the high-brightness and high-quality images, even for standard conference-room and classroom setups.
If you need to show video or film longer than a few minutes per clip, be sure to consider the Epson Pro EX9240 or Epson Pro EX11000. Neither of these alternatives offers the same overall image quality as the LH730 for movies and video, but neither can show rainbow artifacts. Between them, the EX9240 costs less, while the Pro EX11000 offers more connection options, plus a sealed laser light source rather than a standard lamp, which means it needs little maintenance.
When weighing your choices, also keep in mind that if you include only short movie or video clips in your presentations, seeing a few red/green/blue flashes from the LH730 isn't likely to annoy anyone, even those folks prone to seeing them. And if you don't use movie or video clips at all, the rainbows shouldn't be an issue, making the LH730 an excellent choice for business or education use.
