The IT Nerd

Best Buy sent me something that really caught my interest. Specifically the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 2030 projector. This is a a home entertainment projector rather than a home theater projector. What’s the difference? The former typically comes with much higher levels of brightness which allows you to watch TV or movies in a fully lit room (which eliminates the need to have a TV if you so choose), and a built-in audio system as well. Here’s a look at the home cinema projector:

It looks like any other projector that you would see in an office. But the devil’s in the details.

Around back you have all sorts of connections frome HDMI to old school RGB. It is even MHI certified so that you can plug in a Roku Stick or a Chromecast. It weighs just over 6 pounds so it is easy to move about if you need to.

All of that is great, but the question is how well does it work?

To test this, I plugged in my Rogers Cable box via the HDMI port and found a wall in my condo that was large enough to allow me to project an image onto it. The distance from the wall to the projector was roughly 70″. I then used Rogers On Demand to dial up X-Men: Days Of Future Past which I saw on the plane to India a few months ago, but my wife had not seen. The results were pretty good. Image quality was very good at 1080p and color reproduction was as the kids say “on point” as it looked as good as my TV. I did notice some noise in solid areas in some scenes and some slight jitter when the camera panned across the scene in one action sequence. But my wife didn’t notice and I doubt you would unless you were looking for it. In any case, I didn’t consider that to be a negative. In terms of sound quality it matched the speakers in my TV from a quality perspective and it filled the living room of my condo easily.

Now this projector will broadcast 2D and 3D content. I didn’t try the latter for a couple of reasons. I didn’t have any content that was 3D, and even if I did there are no 3D glasses in the box. You’ll have to source those separately. I don’t have an issue with the fact that there were no 3D glasses in the box, but my wife thought that there should be at least a pair. I can see from her point of view that some may not be thrilled about the lack of 3D glasses in the box. That’s something that Epson may want to consider.

The Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 2030 projector goes for $899 at Best Buy. If you want something that you can move about and still use like a TV, or you want an alternative to having a TV, you should take a look at this home cinema projector because it works very, very well and you will not be disappointed if you put down your hard earned cash for one.