BenQ GP520 review: Fantastic 4K pictures for the money

There’s a real sense that traditional projector manufacturers have woken up to the fact that the market has changed. Home cinema projectors are becoming smaller and more stylish, thanks to the advancement of cooler, more energy-efficient LED and laser technology. New DLP chips and pixel-shifting techniques have made 1080p projectors the new entry-level option, bringing 4K to more affordable price points. While there’s still a market for massive ceiling-mounted units for use in dedicated home cinema rooms, there’s growing demand for good-looking, compact models that can work in the average living room – maybe even offering an alternative to a big-screen television.

BenQ has long been one of the more innovative members of the old guard, with models like the GV30 that showed it wasn’t adverse to making risky or unusual choices. And now with the BenQ GP520, it has a projector primed to take on new-fangled models like the XGIMI Horizon S Pro and Anker Nebula Cosmos 4K SE. The GP520 is fairly small and quite attractive in an unobtrusive way. It’s priced to take on the entry-level 4K competition, and its performance is very good indeed. If you’re in the market for an affordable, no-fuss, one-box home cinema projector, you’ll want to find out how it measures up.   

What do you get for the money?

The BenQ GP520 costs £1,049, and that outlay gets you a compact and living room-friendly 4K projector with everything you need in one unit. It uses a 4 LED optical system with a 0.47in DLP chip to show pictures at a maximum 2,600 ANSI Lumens brightness level, beating the 1,800 ANSI Lumens of the Nebula Cosmos 4K SE and matching or slightly beating the 1,800 ISO Lumens of the Horizon S Pro (direct comparisons are tricky thanks to the different ways ANSI and ISO lumens are measured).

Like those projectors, the GP520’s DLP chip has a 1080p native resolution, but uses pixel shifting to beam four slightly different 1080p images 240 times per second, creating what looks like a 4K image at 60Hz. It’s just about possible to tell the difference in ideal conditions, but I wouldn’t want to try A-B testing on the average screen in a darkened living room. In terms of definition and clarity, many ‘faux-K’ models can produce fantastic results.

Otherwise, the GP520 promises reproduction of over 1.07 billion colours, 98% coverage of the industry-standard REC.709 colour standard and 81% coverage of DCI-P3. The 1.2:1 throw ratio gives you a maximum recommended 180in image from 4.8m away or a more sensible 100in image from 2.65m away. There’s no Dolby Vision support, but HDR10+ and HLG are both on offer. Meanwhile, the GP520 features dual 12W speakers for Dolby Audio and incorporates Google TV streaming through its built-in Wi-Fi 6 connectivity.

All this is crammed inside a unit with a square-ish 241 x 225mm footprint standing only 151mm high. A panel on the rear, near the top, features two HDMI 2.1 inputs, three USB Type-A ports, a single USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm audio out. One of the HDMI ports also supports eARC, for easy connection to a soundbar or an A/V amp.

What does it do well?

First of all, this is the first BenQ projector I’ve tested that has really aced ease of setup and ease of use. Providing you can use the Google Home app on a smartphone or tablet, setting up the Wi-Fi, adding your account, and installing apps is an absolute breeze, and even signing into the most popular streaming apps won’t cause you any headaches if you can scan a QR code or authorise the sign-in from another device.

BenQ’s Smart Image Alignment tech does a great job of auto-focus, screen fit, and auto-keystone correction, even if the resulting image doesn’t always cover the entire width of the screen; an area where XGIMI’s tech is ever so slightly more reliable. All the same, it’s not hard to get a great picture in minutes, and any significant movement of the screen or the projector results in a quick realignment in an instant.

What’s more, the projected image looks great. Clarity and detail are almost on par with the Horizon S Pro, while the colours in the Cinema and Auto Cinema modes can be rich and vivid without stepping over the line into looking over-saturated or punched-up. Black levels are never going to match your average LCD screen, let alone a Mini LED or OLED, but they are dark enough to give you some contrast in darker scenes, and visibility wasn’t a problem in the material I watched during testing.

I did some A/B testing with XGIMI’s little wonder, and while the XGIMI had a slight edge on definition, the BenQ’s presentation was a little more cinematic, and it coped a little better with detail in dark scenes in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, and with the blinding desert vistas of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The distinctions are subtle, and both are excellent home cinema projectors for the money, but it’s good to see BenQ playing at the top of the game.

Talking of games, the BenQ also worked well as a console display, with support for ALLM low-latency output through its two HDMI ports, though no 1080p/120Hz capabilities. Playing Avowed and Doom: The Dark Ages, I was struck by how smooth and immersive the presentation was, and how well it handled scenes with bright HDR highlights and the kind of darker, gloomier areas where Doom’s hellspawn tend to congregate.

Sure, there’s no Dolby Vision support and no Filmmaker mode, but HDR10+ content looks superb in a darkened room, and highlights weren’t lacking in eye-scorching intensity. And while I couldn’t reach BenQ’s 80% DCI-P3 coverage in my colorimeter tests, the 69.6% I could get in the Cinema mode is not embarrassing by the standards of some rivals, with the Cosmos 4KSE hitting 64.7%. The Horizon S Pro managed 93.5%.

The sound very nearly measures up to the high standards set by the picture. It’s powerful, weighty and impressively clear, and you can turn the volume up uncomfortably high before any distortion starts creeping in. However, the bass is a little thuddy where it could be more articulate, and there’s not much sense of the sound spreading evenly around the room. It’s not that it’s directional to the extent that you can hear it’s all coming from within a compact unit, but I’ve heard other one-box systems that create a wider and more convincing soundstage.

What could it do better?

Not much – we’re talking minor issues. Perhaps the biggest is that, while the GP520 comes with apps for all the major UK catch-up and streaming services, I had some temporary issues getting the Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5 apps up and running, and I was unable to get BBC iPlayer running at all. The issues with the first three apps were resolved through a quick software update, but BBC iPlayer seems to have problems with most Google TV projectors, and it’s more to do with licensing than any manufacturer-specific concerns.

You might also want to make a few adjustments to get the best possible image quality. Turning down the MEMC motion compensation is a great start, and I’d also recommend turning down the luma control, as the variation in brightness and contrast can be distracting.

One last point that’s always highly subjective: if you’re sensitive to DLP’s notorious rainbow effect and flashing on bright white highlights, the GP520 seems more prone to these than some rivals. It might be that due to the high brightness levels and impressive contrast, but I occasionally had issues with rainbow fringeing and white flashes in scenes where I don’t normally encounter them. It wasn’t serious enough to spoil the scenes concerned, but it is something you might want to bear in mind. 

Should you buy the BenQ GP520?

If you’re not so affected, this is a superb 4K projector for the money. It’s not quite up there with the Anker Nebula X1 or BenQ’s own brilliant W2720i, but it’s easily on a par with the Horizon S Pro on image quality, while having some advantages when it comes to colour reproduction, shadow detail, connectivity and software.

Spend more and you’ll find models with deeper blacks, brighter highlights, improved HDR support and a slightly richer colour palette, but they won’t be cheap or necessarily as easy to set up. While the GP520 isn’t perfect, it’s right up there with the leaders in its class.