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The EH-TW5910 is Epson’s mid-range Full HD (1,920×1,080) 3-LCD 3D projector and an update to the EH-TW5900, which previously won a Best Buy award. Not a lot has changed in terms of looks, as it still has two aggressive exhaust fans on either side of its centrally mounted lens, but inside its giant white chassis is a brighter 2,100 ANSI lumen lamp, so you’re not relegated to watching films in purely dark room.
Much like the previous model, its size will mean you’ll probably want to mount it to the ceiling or put it on a shelf as it takes up a fair amount of floor space. It’s a shame that there’s no lens shift, and only digital keystone correction.
There are plenty of connections round the back to help set it up, though, including two HDMI inputs as well as VGA, composite, component and two USB ports (for displaying pictures on mass storage devices, or for audio and video from a PC) inputs and a mini-USB service port.
Since it uses 3-LCD technology instead of DLP, the EH-TW5910 can produce much richer colours, and this was apparent as soon as we turned it on. Even with all the lights on in our test room, primary colours stood out against the screen and darker scenes showed lots of detail thanks to its excellent contrast levels. Of course, the best picture quality comes when you turn the lights off, but you shouldn’t have too much trouble using it during the day or with a few lights left on in the background if you’d rather not sit in complete darkness.
It has five 2D picture modes and two modes for 3D, including Dynamic, Living Room, Natural, Cinema, 3D Dynamic and 3D Cinema. Straight out of the box, the projector is set to Auto, which locks down everything from brightness, contrast, colour saturation and temperature, tint, sharpness, skin tone, power consumption and its advanced colour settings, but all of the other modes can be customised to your liking.
During our testing, we found that its Auto settings produced perfectly vibrant colours with the lights off, but blacks were deeper and truer when we switched it to Cinema. Living Room, on the other hand, is probably best for watching during the day, as its extra brightness was just a little too intense with the lights off, but Dynamic looked far too oversaturated regardless of the lighting condition.
The TW5910 also has a Super-res option that’s meant to increase the amount of detail, particularly if your projecting film in standard definition, but the effect was so minimal that it didn’t really translate to sharper images on screen. Text looked a little cleaner, but overall it wasn’t hugely noticeable. Still, we liked that we were able to access it via its remote rather than having to scroll through the menu options, and its instant 2D to 3D button was similarly handy.
Its main highlight is its 3D support. You’ll have to buy Epson’s ELPGS03 active shutter glasses separately (£68 from www.ebuyer.com) as none are included in the box, but we didn’t see any ghosting, flicker or crosstalk in our testing. We didn’t even have to worry about a loss of brightness either, as its comprehensive 3D menu controls meant we could not only enhance the brightness but also change the depth of field as well.
Its integrated 20W speakers were similarly impressive. Voices were very clear and it had plenty of bass and volume to fill our test room. This is good enough for occasional use, but for films you’ll want to use a proper home cinema amplifier and speakers.
Running costs are a little higher than on budget projectors, although not too bad thanks to the lamp’s rated lifespan of 4,000 hours at full brightness and 5,000 hours in ECO mode. This works out to around 6p and 4p per hour respectively.
Overall, the Epson EH-TW5910 is an outstanding projector, but our main concern is the price. At just under £900, it’s £100 more expensive than the equally brilliant Optoma HD25 and doesn’t come with a pair of 3D glasses like the HD25 does. This just edges it out of Best Buy territory, but if you’re particularly susceptible to the rainbow effect produced by DLP projectors, then the TW-5910’s 3-LCD technology is the clear choice.
