Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 705HD

Throw (3.80)

All projectors have a distance (or range of distances) across which they can project (or “throw”) an image. This is important as it determines where the projector has to be mounted. If a projector has a small throw distance, it can be located close to the screen. If it has a long throw distance, it can be placed far back, away from the screen. Some projector (like the 705HD) also include a zoom lens which allows you to adjust the throw angle, and this makes the projector more flexible. To project onto a 64-inch screen (measured diagonally), the 705HD has to be placed between 6 foot 7 inches and 7 foot 9 inches away.

	Epson Home Cinema 705HD Required Distance for Screen Size
	64-inch screen	80-inch screen	100-inch screen	120-inch screen	140-inch screen
Wide Angle	6ft 7in	8ft 2in	10ft 3in	12ft 3in	14ft 3in
Telephoto	7ft 9in	9ft 8in	12ft 1in	14ft 6in	16ft 11in

Screen Brightness

The bigger the screen, the less bright the image that the projector produces. In the table below, we calculated how bright the image would be for a number of different sizes, and if this would be usable in a number of different lighting situations.

	Epson Home Cinema 705HD Projector brightness
64-inch screen	670 lux
80-inch screen	429 lux
100-inch screen	274 lux
120-inch screen	191 lux
140-inch screen	140 lux

We found that the 705HD produces an image which would still be usable up to about 120 inches in a darkened room (such as your living room at night), but would only be usable in a typical office to a size of about 64 inches: anything bigger than this, the image becomes almost unrecognizable, as it is not visible.

	Epson Home Cinema 705HD Screen Visibility for Screen Size and Room Brightness
	64-inch screen	80-inch screen	100-inch screen	120-inch screen	140-inch screen
Darkened Room	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Dimly Lit Room	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Moderate Lighting	No	No	No	No	No
Bright Lighting	No	No	No	No	No

To show how the image would look in a number of different lighting levels, we project a test image onto our test screen (which is 80 inches on the diagonal) and adjust the light levels. As you can see below, the image becomes rather pale and unattractive at the higher light levels, so this proejctor would do a poor job in a moderate and well-lit room: it simply can’t produce enough light to still be visible with moderate ambient light.

	Ambient Light Performance Comparisons
	Epson Home Cinema 705HD	ViewSonic PJD6531w	Optoma HD66	Canon LV-8310
Darkened Room (10 lux)
Dimly Lit Room (15 lux)
Moderate Lighting (500 lux)
Bright Lighting (1500 lux)

Screen Materials

You don’t always have a projection screen handy: sometimes, you have to project onto whatever is on the walls. Below, you can see photos of the images that this projector produced when shining onto a number of materials: a white-painted wall, a cream painted wall, wood paneling and a glossy whiteboard screen. The 705HD doesn’t have many options to compensate for different materials or colors, apart from a color tint control that can be used to tweak the color to some degree. Other projectors offer a number of presets for different paint colors, but the 705HD does not.

Optical Issues (9.00)

We use a number of test screens to examine the optical performance of projectors, but we found very few issues with the 705HD: it produced a very clean, sharp image across our test screen. The top image is the original test screen that we are projecting, with the crops below showing how the proejctor reproduces the image. As you can see, the result is a sharp, clean image with little or no distortion or other issues.

Image Sharpness

Video Processing (1.00)

The 705HD includes a few video processing features. However, we found that most didn’t have any significant effect on image quality.

Setting	Claimed Function	Our Impression
Auto Iris	Automatically adjusts the projected luminance according to the brightness of the image.	Can increase the contrast on presentations, but has little effect on video signals.

Formats (7.00)

The 705HD is a WXGA projector, with a native resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels. The cloest video equivalent to that is 720p, with a resolution of 1280 by 720.

Read Reviews of Comparison Products
ViewSonic PJD6531w	Optoma HD66	Canon LV-8310