BenQ GV50 review

If you peruse the projector selection of most brands, you’ll find a collection of projectors that get bigger as they get more expensive, but which otherwise all look, well, like projectors have looked forever.

Now head to BenQ’s projector selection. There are square projectors, circular projectors, thin flat ones and big bulbous ones: your first choice, it seems, is not one of lumen counts or contrast ratios, but of simple shape and form.

The GV50 is one of the circular ones, when viewed from the side, at least, and these have the particular magic trick of rolling around in their magnetic base to aim the picture wheresoever you may wish, including the ceiling.

As such the GV50 falls into BenQ’s ‘portable’ category, and is truly portable, not merely moveable, thanks to an internal rechargeable battery, in addition to built-in speakers, and Wi-Fi networking that allows streaming direct to its internal Google TV interface. It’s also the first of the breed to bring Netflix to one of BenQ’s rotational projector designs.

Build & facilities

We’ve reviewed two such circular models previously in Sound+Image magazine. First was BenQ’s GV30, a 185mm circle with resolution of 1280×720 pixels and output of 300 ANSI lumens.

Next was the GV31, slightly larger, resolution up to 1920x1080, same 300 ANSI lumens. There was also a lower mini version of the circular design, with resolution of just 845 x 500.

Those have all gone now, leaving this new GV50 as BenQ’s sole circular model. It’s a tiny bit bigger than any of its predecessors, still 1920x1080, but the headline gain in specs is a rise to 500 ANSI lumens, so promising additional strength of light to overcome ambient situations, as well as boosting brightness in any given position. There’s HDR support despite being a 2K projector, as it can accept a 4K input with HDR10 metadata. And it uses a laser light source, so no bulbs to replace, and a promise of 30,000 hours life.

The basic rolling form, while still innovative, is unchanged. The circular unit slots into a little magnetic base tray and can then be revolved to shine out at whatever angle you’d like. This may be up or down a bit, to get the image just where you want it on your screen or wall, or it might be rotated a full 90 degrees to point up at the ceiling, so you can enjoy home entertainment when lying horizontal, most likely in bed, but potentially teenagers enjoying a slumber party with videos playing on the ceiling.

The rechargeable battery inside promises something like 150 minutes of battery juice, so you can move it easily around the house temporarily without cables, or even play your movie onto a screen in the garden, or on the walls of a family tent out in the bush. And if the little magnetic tray doesn’t let you revolve the projector to the right position, there’s a screw mount underneath which will fix it onto a tripod.

If you’re too far down the garden or out in the bush, you may no longer have a Wi-Fi network connection, thereby disabling most of the smart streaming within the GV50. In previous versions this streaming has come from a physical dongle which you installed inside the projector by pulling off one side of it; interestingly the side still pulls off but there’s no longer anything there: the smarts seem now to be fully embedded, though there is talk in the manual of an 'internal HDMI input'.

Wherever it may lie, the latest smart interface provides not just Android TV but the slightly smarter and more personalisable Google TV, with access to literally thousands of apps for both visual and audio entertainment, including all Australian TV catch-up apps. Networking also gives the additional options of streaming from another device via AirPlay or Google Cast.

Those down the garden need not despair if the Wi-Fi blinks out, however, thanks to the GV50’s physical connections. You can use a media player app to play files from storage attached to either the USB-A or USB-C socket, or you can cable a device to either the HDMI input or the USB-C socket (for which a certified USB-C 3.0 cable is repeatedly recommended in the manual).

Connection and control

Getting the unit networked via Wi-Fi is left to Google Home, an app-based connection method which fails for us as often as it succeeds; here we had to back out of a failed set-up and do it all manually, typing our Google details into the on-screen keyboard. (As with all things Wi-Fi, if at first you don’t succeed, make a cup of tea and try again.) Note that Google’s set-up instructions refer to the BenQ projector slightly confusingly as a ‘TV’.

But once in, you can set up the Google TV interface quickly, populating your preferred apps en masse rather than one at a time, and there’s a nice on-screen walkthrough of key GV50 abilities, including how to use the one-click auto adjustment of focus, autokeystone and digital zoom, repositioning, even now image rotation to get the picture shone into weird places. The walkthrough also mentions the sleep timer for those who are bedding down during entertainment sessions, and two apps: an onscreen Projector Assistant (hints, tips and ambient backgrounds), and ‘Smart Remote for BenQ Projector’.

We put this second app on our phone; it searched for devices, finding something called ‘GoogleTV3303’, which we guessed might be the GV50; it was, then it warned us it would disconnect, and did, and when we reconnected it was now called the BenQGV01. Thereafter the app could be used for a certain degree of control, including opening key apps.

But we doubt many people will need a control app, so long as they don’t lose the remote control, which is light but solid, simple yet fairly comprehensive, with quick keys for YouTube, Prime Video and Netflix.

This last is worth highlighting: Netflix has long been an omission for many projector brands, because of a long wait for certification and DRM clearance. That’s all now completed, allowing native Netflix here, with no dodgy workarounds required – this alone may be a key reason for some to buy the very latest model, as well perhaps for BenQ to have pensioned off all its previous ones.

There are also dual Bluetooth connections; you can stream music inwards, to listen on the GV50’s stereo speakers, and perhaps more usefully you can stream sound out to Bluetooth headphones, an excellent solution for those bedtime (ceiling!) projection sessions when your partner (or cat) has already dozed off.

Viewing sessions

Once you’re connected and ready to play, pick your projector position! The automatic set-up is ready to deliver a rectangular image no matter where you put the GV50, given its ability to avoid obstacles, rotate itself and additionally rotate the image to fit – it was great fun moving it around and seeing what it could handle, which is remarkable!

But of course, if you can give it a straight-on throw at your screen position, you’ll be minimising the pixel reallocation involved in such cunning trickery, and thereby maximising the image quality, brightness, and native pixel count of the resulting image.

Your key decision is distance from the screen, because even with the digital zoom the distance will determine your screen size, and your screen size will determine the amount of brightness the BenQ can deliver. Such a quick auto set-up gives the advantage here that if you are fighting ambient light, it’s a simple matter to bring the projector forward to shrink the screen and boost the onscreen brightness. But with a 1.2 throw ratio you’ll need a full 2.6-metre throw for a 100-inch image, and more than three metres for 120 inches.

Happily the 500 lumens proved more impressive than you might expect at lighting up the screen; a proper screen will make the most of available light, of course, but if you lack one, deep in the projector menus you can adjust for projection onto wall colours of red, orange, blue, green, cyan, yellow or purple, all rather extreme paint choices! (Wot, no beige or magnolia?)

Talking of primaries, BenQ is routinely excellent on colour delivery with its higher home cinema models, and that expertise trickles down to its lower models. There’s not the full punchy brilliance of brighter full-size projectors, of course, but colours were accurate enough, with skin tones suffering no exaggeration or pallidness or browning. There was enough in the way of contrast levels to differentiate within dark scenes in Binge’s new The Day Of the Jackal, even for the deepening Whitehall browns and Moscow greys of Cold War era The Courier with Benedict Cumberbatch on Netflix, where the subtleties of the colour grading might challenge many a smaller projector.

But this is no pico-powered handheld; the GV50 is just large enough to punch enough to impress, especially when the scene was brightened with more colourful material, such as Gardening Australia on ABC iView, showing off what BenQ claims as 92% coverage of the Rec.709 colour gamut. Any adjustments here would be tricky: saturation and separate R, G, B gain sliders are available but accessing them stops the programming.

This is true of nearly all settings, which are grouped in two sets under the Google TV settings (the dedicated button on the remote could sometimes be quite slow to bring these up). The ‘Projector’ set covers all the smart set-up stuff, while ‘Display & Sound’ leads to image mode choice of Vibrant, Cinema, Night Shift, Game (a Boost mode provides low latency from HDMI or USB-C) and Bright, varying by brightness and slightly differing colour palettes as well, so that we spent most of our time in the Custom mode, gaining access to our choice of contrast, saturation, sharpness, hue and colour gain settings, most of which are otherwise locked off in the other modes.

Thus optimised, how impressively strong a bigscreen image the GV50 could deliver once the daylight faded and our room’s light was minimised, and looking more a real home cinema image than a portable projector image in many regards: smooth imaging across the screen, with only text and graphics betraying its price more than actual movie material or TV shows. We watched several episodes of The Curse of Oak Island, its energetic soundtrack pulsing through the little speakers, and the 100-inch image adding to the glory of the mysterious bobby-dazzlers turning up on the beach.

We did try it on the wall, removing our screen to show a large expanse of beige, and were confused to find the BenQ shrinking the screen size down dramatically. This proved to be governed by a fairly deep menu option for ‘Object Avoidance’; the GV50 was interpreting the four screws for our screen mounting as obstacles, so it was using only the small wall area below!

With this setting toggled off, the screen resumed full size. Using a wall dulls contrast, certainly, but colours held up remarkably well, and we think all but critical viewers would enjoy a movie thrown up on a big blank surface like this, especially given the GV50’s abilities at impromptu performances in any location.

We did not initially notice cadence issues – by which we mean judder. Sadly some built-in media sources for projectors are turning up locked to 30/60 frames per second, causing pull-down judder when showing Australian 25/50Hz programming, and even for the 24 frames per second of movies.

There is none of that at all if you are using an HDMI-connected AppleTV 4K to feed the GV50 different formats via HDMI; the GV50 accepted not only all the different frame rates but even 4K inputs at frame rates up to 60Hz. So the projector itself can play anything.

Not so the projector’s built-in Google TV interface, however. Here we saw conversion judder when playing Australian content – on long landscape pans in ABC’s Foreign Correspondent, for example, and on the post-intro Canberra pans in E02 of the documentary Nemesis, where the 50-to-60fps conversion (or 25 to 30fps) was clear, if not too severe.

There's nothing to be done about this; there are no motion settings to assist. Yet on the previous GV31 projector, BenQ’s own QS02 dongle could (slightly laboriously) be switched between 24, 50 and 60Hz, thereby banishing judder. Those menus are missing here. When we asked BenQ, their engineers in Taiwan thought the same options should be available, but they were greyed out on the unit with us, and eventually it was admitted that yes, the output is locked to 30/60fps.

The effect is rarely horrendous, only occasionally intrusive (usually on long pans), and might be considered by many to be outweighed by the joys of the big-screen delivery. Nevertheless the GV50 has a Google TV dongle/internal device locked to 60 frames per second, but is being sold in a country where nearly all content is made at 50 frames per second. We asked if this might be addressed in a future firmware update for the internal dongle, but the final response from Taiwan HQ was: “Regarding the framerate will follow the projector’s setting and as most of the content these days are in 60Hz, we make sure to give the best viewing experience.”

All this will be no problem for users that just want Netflix and YouTube. Nor does it apply when playing material via HDMI; the projector itself can do 50fps (and 24fps, the native cadence for every movie ever made, for which interface support might also be useful).

As usual we experienced still more judder when streaming video wirelessly via AirPlay from a Macbook computer; here this uses a specific app called Screen Sharing for iOS, which then makes the projector visible for sharing or extending the laptop screen. The connection was kept solid, and watchable, though with glitches, judder and occasional freezes. Results may vary with different Wi-Fi, but in our test both projector and laptop should have been pulling 40-50Mbps.

Far better, best indeed, is that direct cable connection. Via HDMI our laptop video was rock steady, while Blu-rays and AppleTV 4K media played this way gave the best images available from the GV50. We enjoyed the Australia-based episode ‘Tiny Heroes Down Under’ from National Geographic’s A Real Bug’s Life, its colourful macro images up on the big screen highlighting every insect scale, hair and alarming orange pincer, the colours bright and motion perfectly smooth. It’s the ability to throw this quality of image from a convenient rolling battery projector that marks out the GV50 as a remarkable performer.

Sound

The sound delivery from the built-in speakers is impressive in being able to go remarkably loud; these are, after all, small drivers tucked into a compact projector body. There are several sound settings available, including one called ‘Ceiling Cinema’ which the menu says “best fits the rolling-up projection situation”. ‘Cinema’ and ‘Music’ seemed most clear for dialogue, though there’s the inevitable distraction that the sound doesn’t come from the screen; it may well be behind you.

There’s an easy workaround here for that: the projector (or Google TV) can pair with a Bluetooth speaker (or hi-fi system), so you can upgrade the sound and equally importantly move it to the screen position. Even with a $200 Bluetooth speaker near the screen, the sound became far more cinematic, even wide, and sync was perfect. You can move a portable speaker around the home with the projector, and it may even help the projector’s battery life not to be playing audio.

The projector itself was all but silent until we’d been using it for more than four hours straight, by which time the fan (we presume) was whirring audibly (with a tone around 175Hz, we think), enough to interfere with quiet listening but easily drowned out by turning up the speaker volume.

And this won’t happen on battery power anyway, as this prevents full-power performance, including limiting its brightness, so there’s a corollary that if you’re in portable mode and lacking brightness to cut through, go fetch the power pack, as it’ll probably help.

All this is very impressive for the money. Ultimately of course there is the limitation in brightness in a projector of this size, and also in sharpness; the DLP mirror-flipping DMD chip used here is small, only a quarter of an inch in size, most likely the DLP230NP; this does not seem to use XPR pixel-flipping of a lower resolution, but it does have smaller-pitched pixels than larger 0.47-inch DMDs.

So this is a clear drop from both larger 2K projectors and certainly ‘4K’ projection – but then again, how much actual 4K material will you watch? Short of UltraHD Blu-ray or the best streaming services on their priciest tiers, most sources match the 2K (1920 x 1080) resolution delivered by the GV50 or lower: only the very best of our Australian broadcast TV reaches 2K, all normal Blu-rays are 2K – and all this can look pretty good here when played from a stream or via HDMI, especially under low room lighting to make the most of the GV50’s illumination.

And it is not solely resolution that makes the difference. While it is wildly unfair to compare the GV50 with a $15k native-4K beast of a projector to which it was the immediate successor on our review shelf, or indeed with BenQ’s $9999 ‘true 4K’ W5800 projector which visited not long before, it’s worth realising that the difference in the performance at this level is only partly the resolution, and the lower brightness: there is also the optical sharpness in edge-to-edge image quality that comes from a full-size light engine and better lenses, a truly natural and cinema colour palette that can come from higher colour definition: these will be the main reasons for moving up to higher models at higher prices, which of course BenQ is happy also to offer.

Verdict

Ultimate projection quality is not the end game for BenQ's rolling GV50. It is designed to achieve impressive portable and movable performance; indeed given the inclusion of battery operation, a full Google TV interface and a built-in sound system, it’s amazing such a clever and versatile design can do all this for what is around the same price as the best of those revolving BenQ predecessors. And with this new model BenQ has lifted the results considerably, wherever you may choose to aim the revolving GV50. It’s a shame the Google TV OS can’t play movies or a lot of Australian/UK content at a native frame rate; otherwise it would be a full recommendation from us.

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