BenQ Home Cinema HT2060 Review

The BenQ 2060 is a high-quality projector at a decent price. It produces a fantastic picture that will impress most people but requires a dark room to perform at its peak and produces slightly less accurate colors than the best of the best.

Performance Comparison

Entertainment

For optimal performance in a home entertainment environment, a projector should deliver excellent contrast, high brightness, and a crisp picture overall. Additional smart features, such as built-in streaming apps, are often present in more advanced models, earning them extra points in this metric.

The BenQ 2060 is aimed at the home cinema market, and it does well there as long as you aren't planning to set it up in a bright room. The picture quality is super crisp, and it only trails behind some of the top contenders in the cinema category because it lacks their brightness and smart features. It produces slightly warmer colors than the most accurate projectors, but that would be easy to look past if you aren't comparing them all side by side like we have.

Business

The BenQ 2060 isn't ideal as a business projector, although it does check a few of the boxes. When projectors are used in business settings, they are brought out for presentations in well-lit rooms. Although it is relatively portable and compact, has excellent onboard controls, and produces crisp, clear text and graphics, it's so dim that it's hard to read under bright lights. The 2060 does, however, have an excellent range of input/output ports to accommodate a wide range of laptops and mobile devices: 2x HDMI, 1x USB, 2x1x RS-232, and an audio input/output. We also appreciated its focus, zoom, and lens shift controls being easy to find on the top of the projector.

Contrast Ratio

The manufacturer lists a 500,000:1 contrast ratio for this unit, and we found it did do a pretty satisfactory job distinguishing between dark and light colors on the screen, but it was placed near the middle of the pack in our measurements. In our ANSI contrast test, the 2060 landed a 288:15 contrast ratio.

Brightness

Compared to other projectors in its price range and above, the BenQ 2060 is on the dim side of the spectrum. As we mentioned before, we don't find it to be at its best outside of pretty dark rooms. The manufacturer claims 2600 lumens. When we used a light meter to measure, we found an average of 286 luts, and our carefully conducted ANSI Lumens Test scored this BenQ at 870 ANSI lumens; not great. However, this unit does still offer a pretty spectacular picture in the right (dark) environment.

Setup & Use

Projectors that score well in this metric are flush with convenience features like front and rear adjustable legs for uneven surfaces, backlit remotes for locating buttons during movie time, voice command recognition, and decent onboard speakers. We also award points for more robust keystoning and focus features, zoom capability, and ceiling and tripod mount compatibility.

The BenQ 2060 is a little below average in many of these areas. While it features a front leg for adjusting the level, it's not as smooth as some others, and it's missing the rear ones found on some other units. It also features basic horizontal and vertical keystoning, manual focus, but no automatic features found on more premium units. We did appreciate that it comes with a backlit remote and 5 watt stereo speakers onboard.

Input Lag

A projector with low input lag is essential for competitive gamers looking to take the big screen. The BenQ 2060 performs pretty well here, with an average response time of 49 milliseconds at its 1080p resolution. With its combination of moderate price, good picture quality, and low response time, the 2060 positions itself as one of the most attractive options for someone who intends to use a projector for gaming

Should You Buy the BenQ 2060?

The BenQ 2060 packs a pretty good picture at an attractive price. If you're looking for a projector to set up in your dark home theater or a bedroom, this one might fit the bill, but if you have ambitions of using it in a bright room in the daylight, we recommend that you consider other options.

What Other Projector Should You Consider?