BenQ TK850 vs Epson 5050UB: Which Projector is Better?

Epson Home Cinema 5050UB vs BenQ TK850 4K projector, let’s compare these two famous brand projectors side by side, to see which one is better and more worth buying.

First, let’s take a rough look on these two projectors. Epson 5050UB is a 3LCD projector via three 0.74″ chips at a resolution of 1920x1080p, with brightness rated for 2600 ANSI lumens; BenQ TK850 is a DLP projector via 0.47″chip at a resolution of 4K (3840×2160), with brightness rated for 3,000 ANSI lumens.

Light source:

Epson 5050UB uses UHE bulb, and BenQ TK850 uses Ultra-high pressure mercury lamp. Both of them are traditional lamp-based projectors with similar lamp lifetime (BenQ TK850 has lamp life of more than 4,000 hours, Epson 5050UB has a lamp lifespan only 3,500-5,000 hours). Traditional lamp may fall short when comparing to LED projector and laser projector in aspect of lamp lifetime, but they can offer incredible brightness, and meanwhile, produce better and gorgeous color saturation. On the other hand, lamp technology so far is very honed and matured.

Brightness:

Epson 5050UB is rated at 2,600 lumens of brightness, which is very bright already. While BenQ TK850 is rated at incredible 3000 lumens of brightness. Both of them allow you to get highly detailed images and a rich color spectrum even if there are ambient light in your viewing space. But strictly speaking, BenQ TK850 will perform better than Epson 5050UB in coping with external light source.

Display technology:

BenQ TK850 adopts the latest DLP display technology. DLP is a technology both meet the demand of cost-efficiency and sharp image output, as long as the viewer is not sensible to the RBE. (To know more details feel free to read What Is Rainbow Effect (RBE) on Projectors?) Epson 5050UB adopts 3LCD technology which delivers more bright color and does well in color reproduction. But for pictures with more black and white areas, 3LCD performs slightly worse than DLP projector does.

Resolution:

The BenQ TK850 and Epson 5050UB all come in 4K (3840×2160) resolution, is able to maintain full color saturation and produce image detail to faithfully display all the videos the way they were meant to be seen.

Epson 5050UB may fall short comparing with BenQ TK850 in Brightness and resolution, However Epson 5050UB has some critical powerful features that BenQ TK850 lacks. Epson 5050UB supports full HD 3D and HDR, is able to offer users more immersive and enjoyable movie viewing experience.