Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsHDMI nightmare - look to other brands
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2016
Unfortunately, this projector suffers from a couple of huge HDMI problems.
1 - The HDMI socket is either loose or designed poorly. This seems to be a BENQ thing as you can read on multiple forums about people skinning down their HDMI cables (the boot where the plug goes in) to maybe hopefully fit in the socket so that the picture doesn't flicker away. So if I need to cut at my HDMI cables in the hope that it will hold a picture consistently... I would get a picture, a butterfly would land 3 blocks away and the picture would go down.
2 - The HDMI handshake is awful - AT BEST - My previous projector took a dive (thanks Optoma, <2 years old) and I wanted to switch brands to not reward lousy manufacturing. Well, I learned my lesson. The Optoma would perform the HDMI handshake flawlessly within seconds. This BENQ? No desire whatsoever to talk with my Yamaha receiver (<2 years old, nothing ancient). My cabling is all 1.4a, and it all worked without a single hiccup before. With the BENQ, I had to put an HDMI device that strips out HDCP in between my receiver and the projector to even get it to see it. Switch inputs? Yeah that'll cost you at least 30 seconds of handshaking and hoping it will actually handshake.
Folks, I have 3 BENQ monitors for my PC, and they are absolutely fine, but the projector? Awful - you HAVE to get HDMI right. Every time, BENQ. Otherwise, there's no point if I have no signal source, right?
Sorry, but I have to rate this as a horrible product and pretty much have to bail on BENQ permanently for projectors. As I mentioned above, there are a ton of forums with people having problems with the BENQ and HDMI. Whether they source the components poorly, or they have a different team of people for HDMI than their monitors, I'll never know.
