BenQ GV50 Review: Highly Portable, but With Quality Trade-Offs Leave a comment

You’ll be able to slide the projector up or down on the bottom for a vertical shift up a wall or ceiling. For a horizontal tilt, you may fold out the bottom’s two toes and level the projector at a slight angle on the ceiling. Regardless of the course, it’s simple to slip round but in addition stays put.

The projector solely has one HDMI port, which you should utilize for ARC 5.1 pass- by audio or connecting to a different supply, like a gaming console. There’s a USB-A port and a USB-C port, each for connecting a thumb drive or a tough drive (or charging a gadget), plus a 3.5-mm port. The GV50 doesn’t have an Ethernet port and makes use of Wi-Fi 5, which is older and never as broadly suitable or as speedy as fashionable requirements like Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7. I had some connection points with my Google Nest mesh community the place the projector couldn’t join.

Except for needing to finish a system replace that took about 45 minutes, setup was ultra-smooth and largely concerned utilizing the Google Dwelling app to scan a QR code and set up the apps. The GV50 used auto-keystoning to map to my projector display screen, and it labored properly. After I used the projector on a wall and on the ceiling, the keystoning additionally labored—I solely made a couple of minor changes to the scale. The GV50 distant makes use of the everyday, intuitive BenQ structure with a Dwelling button within the middle, a setup button that is simple to seek out, and shortcut buttons for Netflix, YouTube, and Prime.

Not solely can the GV50 run on battery energy, nevertheless it additionally has loads of settings to handle its effectivity, together with powering down mechanically after a set interval. I discovered Battery mode to be marginally useful, since I exploit the machine in my home, related to a wall outlet, however the functionality does add portability must you need to use the projector whereas tenting or dwelling anyplace else that retailers are sparse. You should utilize the projector on battery cost alone for a couple of hours, however the machine will dim slightly bit to avoid wasting energy.

Image High quality and Extra

The GV50 shouldn’t be making an attempt to be a cinematic marvel by any means, however the projector failed my typical Spears & Muncil benchmark exams. I seen the pores and skin tone exams have been about common for a midrange mannequin like this, not exhibiting a lot tonal variation. Within the demo reel exams, the 1080p high quality and lack of excellent distinction and brightness have been rather more apparent. A crimson cactus and yellow flower lacked vividness, and bushes within the foreground of a mountain scene appeared too darkish and combined into the inky black background. Butterflies that ought to have appeared shiny and colourful appeared boring, flat, and a bit lifeless.

After I switched to streaming from my iPhone 17 Professional and an iPad 12.9-inch, the GV50’s sluggish processing pace grew to become a problem. Whereas each Google Forged and Apple AirPlay have been purposeful, the playback was uneven and jittery. If I attempted to fast-forward, the stream would pause or fail altogether because of the paltry 2 GB of RAM and 1.5-GHz processor.