Epson EF-22 review

Perhaps the most surprising spin-off from our seemingly never-ending quest for ever bigger screen experiences at home is the explosion in portable ‘lifestyle’ projectors.

Scarcely a month goes by now without another weirdly and/or wonderfully designed pint-sized projector finding its way onto our test benches – and today it’s the turn of Epson to bid for convenient projection glory with the seriously eye-catching EpiqVision Mini EF-22.

Price

The current official £999 Epson UK price for the EF-22 is high by lifestyle projector standards. A quick comparison with key rivals finds the Nebula Mars 3 Air currently going for £549, and the LG CineBeam Q going for £800.

The $999 US price looks like better value, but for UK buyers it’s probably worth noting that while Epson’s own website is still showing £999, the projector is fairly widely available at the time of writing for around £799.

Design

The Epson EF-22 is one of the most eye-catching lifestyle projectors yet – as well as one of the biggest.

The way the main projector body sits inside an external cradle, within which it can be angled up or down and rotated around, strangely makes it look in photographs as if it’s really small. In reality, though, that main projector section isn’t all that much smaller than a compact ‘regular’ coffee table/desktop projector. Indeed, you can actually buy the same projector without the cradle support for a decent chunk less than the price of the EF-22, under an EF-21 product name.

The EF-22 is not too heavy, though (just 3kg), and the remarkable ease with which the projector can rotate through a full 360 degrees on its circular base or tilt through 150 degrees on its cradle attachment – even becoming a ceiling projector if you wish – really does make it easy to move from room to room or house to house, especially as an attractive felt section on its rear hides a built-in stereo speaker system.

The cradle mount adds enough to the EF-22’s usefulness, we’d argue, to justify its extra cost over the cradle-free EF-21. It becomes even more portable, too, if you sort yourself out with its optional £50 / $50 Custom Travel Case.

Couple the EF-22’s clever and well-built design with the potential extra quality made possible by the relatively large main projector element, and Epson could really have hit on a great best-of-both-worlds solution.

The EF-22’s striking design can be bought in a variety of colour options: Diamond White, Onyx Black, Stone Blue, Quartz Rose and Opal Green. Note that the EF-21 is only available in the white, green and rose colours.

The EF-22 ships with a very likeable remote control. It’s comfortable to hold while being big enough to be easy to find in a dark room, its button layout is logical and spacious, and while it isn’t backlit, its most important buttons are white and faintly luminous, so they’re relatively easy to find without having to switch the lights on.

Features

The Epson EF-22 doesn’t just depend on its lifestyle design for its appeal. For starters, its 3LCD laser lighting system delivers a Full HD resolution, fed by an unusually high (by lifestyle projector standards) claimed 1000 ISO lumens of maximum brightness. To put this in perspective, the impressive Nebula Mars 3 Air, by comparison, only delivers around 400 ANSI lumens.

Epson always likes to state, too, that its 3LCD technology delivers as much as three times the ‘colour brightness’ of the rival DLP approach.

The EF-22 is claimed to be capable of delivering a watchable picture right the way up to 150 inches in size, essentially giving you the option of a home cinema in any room with a big enough chunk of wall space (though we would, as ever, recommend using a dedicated screen, as we do for testing), while its laser lighting system is rated for up to 10 years of trouble-free use without any of the replacement bulbs required by traditional lamp-based projectors.

A claimed 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio sets our marketing-nonsense radar twitching, though, as you’ll almost certainly never actually see anything like such a contrast performance in real-world conditions. Though we guess the fact that Epson throws such a contrast figure out there at least suggests that it appreciates that contrast is important to a home entertainment projector.

The Epson is capable of playing the basic HDR10 and HLG high dynamic range formats via both its internal apps or external sources but, as usual, there’s no support for the premium Dolby Vision or HDR10+ formats.

Being able to rotate and tilt the EF-22 isn’t its only set-up aid. A so-called EpiqSense set-up system automatically takes care of keystone correction (to get the sides of the image perpendicular), image size (screen fit) and image focus. The system can even shift the image around any objects detected between the image and your wall/screen.

The EF-22 is reasonably well-connected for a projector of this sort. A single HDMI 1.4 port is provided for attaching external devices, and there’s USB support for playback of AV files, attaching a web camera and so on. The HDMI port supports eARC, too, so that you can use it to pass audio out to an eARC-capable soundbar or AVR.

There’s also wi-fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, the former so you can take advantage of the EF-22’s built-in Google TV smart system, the latter so you can stream content (including via Google Cast) to the projector from your smartphone or tablet. A built-in twin 5W stereo speaker system combines with the smart device streaming support to give the EF-22 the potential to function as a Bluetooth speaker if you wish.

The stability and performance of Google and Android TV smart systems seems to vary more on projectors than TVs, so we’re not surprised to find the EF-22’s system a bit hit and miss. For instance, while the big global hitters are there, including Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+ and YouTube, along with the ITVX, Channel 4 and My5 UK catch-up apps, neither the BBC iPlayer or Freeview Play apps available from the Google TV app library actually work. We were also faced with a huge 40-minute software update when we first installed the projector, reminding us of another common Google TV gripe.

Picture

As hoped, in many ways the Epson EF-22 performs more like a full-sized projector rather than a portable lifestyle one.

This is especially true when it comes to brightness. Pictures enjoy more pop and punch than those of any other projector we can think of in the same lifestyle projector class, helping them deliver a more convincing display of the difference between SDR and HDR sources and better cut through ambient light than arguably any other projector in its class.

There’s obviously a limit to both of these achievements; HDR doesn’t contain anything like the same fulsome light range that it can on a premium TV, and we’d still strongly recommend that you get your room as dark as you can, at least if you’re watching something intense such as a film or video game. But the same can be said of many projectors costing way more and offering far fewer convenience features than the EF-22.

The EF-22’s pictures are also impressively detailed and sharp. It delivers every bit of its native Full HD resolution, maintaining a crisp, dense feel even when pushed towards the outer limits of its image size support (which we’d put at more like 130 inches, realistically, rather than the quoted 150 inches).

The detailed feel to the image is impressively retained during dark scenes, too, as the EF-22 avoids the sort of hollow black crush or ‘glowing wash’ detail-scrubbing effects many convenience-based projectors tend to suffer to some extent.

Colours look vibrant and rich, with the projector’s unusually high brightness unlocking a wider colour gamut rather than causing colours to start looking washed out, as can be the case with less balanced performers. The colour doesn’t look vulgar or forced, either, even if you stick with the default Vivid picture preset. Though if you do want a more considered, balanced and accurate colour performance, the Cinema preset does a pretty good job of giving you that without losing so much intensity that it becomes too flat or boring.

The EF-22’s sharpness, brightness and rich colours make it a fun gaming display – at least when playing games that don’t depend too much on millisecond reaction times. The 76ms it takes to render images received via its HDMI input is too high to support really competitive games of Call Of Duty, for example.

The main problem with the EF-22 is that its unusually high brightness comes at the expense of deep black tones. Shots that contain a broad mix of light and dark elements look fine, chiefly because, we think, the bright parts of such images are so eye-catchingly intense that they hide the limitations in the dark areas. But predominantly dark scenes appear behind a quite pronounced layer of greyness, meaning they lack the conviction, colour impact and sense of depth the projector provides so well elsewhere.

Other smaller niggles find skin tones looking a touch jaundiced in some of the EF-22’s picture presets, the auto keystone system not always working as perfectly as we’d like, requiring manual intervention, and some signs of detail and colour shade ‘clipping’ in the very brightest parts of HDR images.

It’s worth noting, too, that aside from a decently long selection of picture preset options, the EF-22 doesn’t provide many picture fine-tuning tools with which you might try to tackle its limitations, either.

For the most part, though, especially in the sort of relatively casual, not fully blacked-out viewing environments lifestyle projectors often find themselves working in, the Epson EF-22’s weaknesses typically have far less impact than its strengths.

Sound

The Epson EF-22’s relatively substantial bulk by lifestyle projector standards does not help it deliver the same sort of impact with its sound that it does with its pictures. There just isn’t enough power in its onboard speakers to drive the sound out of the projector’s bodywork with the sort of projection and scale required to either match the scope of the images being produced or make the sound appear to be coming from near the onscreen action.

It’s certainly not all bad news, though. The speakers sound clean and recover plenty of detail from a decent sound mix, and the midrange is expansive enough to make vocals sound well-rounded and contextualised.

Despite the general lack of audio projection, the EF-22 still manages to reproduce a quite effective sense of stereo separation, while treble effects don’t sound excessively harsh or thin. And while the EF-22 might not be powerful enough to sound cinematic or connect a soundtrack with the epic onscreen content, it is actually louder than many of its lifestyle projector rivals – a fact that makes it at least passable as a Bluetooth speaker, too.

Verdict

While it doesn’t have the image flexibility to render dark scenes convincingly enough to make it a true home cinema option, the Epson EF-22 is bright enough, colourful enough and easy enough to set up to make it one of the lifestyle projection world’s more engaging options – especially if you’re looking for an affordable portable projector that’s actually capable of doing at least some sort of justice to HDR sources.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 3
• Features 4

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