Epson 4K UHD Short Throw Projector LS650 Review

Epson 4K UHD Short Throw Projector LS650 Review

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Takeaway: Theater quality 4K viewing at home. Great for movies, TV shows, and gaming.

The projector comes with a power cable, remote control, and instruction manuals. It has a fairly large footprint at 18.5”W x 16”L x 5.5”H and weighs just 16.5 lbs. On the right-hand side of the projector you’ll find a power button and behind this removable door is a manual focus adjustment lever. Towards the back, this switch releases a tray that holds a dust filter for the air intake vents that cool the internal components. At the back you have the I/O ports which consist of a USB-A, HDMI 2.0 with eARC/ARC, a second HDMI 2.0 port, a second USB-A input, a 2Amp DC-out port, Optical Out for audio, and miniUSB service port.

On the left-hand side is the air exhaust vent for and a Kensington lock slot if you want to secure the device with a laptop lock, for example in a business or commercial setting. At the front of the unit you’ll find the 2.1 channel front-facing Yamaha speakers which consist of two 5W drivers and internal 10W subwoofer. The front feet of the projector are adjustable up and down for leveling by about a half inch.

This projector uses 3LCD technology which delivers separate red, blue, and green beams that are recombined in a prism before projecting through the lens to ensure better color vibrancy and accuracy, high brightness, and zero rainbow effect. The image projected is a pixel-shifted 4K Epson calls PRO-UHD, at 3840 x 2160 pixels which delivers around half the resolution of true 4K with 4 million pixels vs. 8 million. However, the difference between these resolutions to the eye at typical viewing distances is hardly noticeable.

With an ultra short-throw projector, there’s no ceiling mount required and you simply need to place the projector on a flat level surface in front of your wall or screen. It can be placed up to 11” from a wall to project a 100-inch diagonal image or up to 16 inches away for a 120” diagonal, which will appear 4-12 inches above the top of the projector accordingly. This short projection distance means it’s less likely that anything will come between the light from the lens and the projected image.

The light source has a rated lifespan of 20,000 hours at full power and can achieve a max brightness of 3600 ISO lumens, bright enough to view with some ambient light, but somewhat washed out in bright lighting. Note that when the brightness is set to above 75% the cooling fan can be quite loud. The fan noise is much quieter and not really noticeable when set under 50%,which is still plenty bright in a dark room. The projector can generate a lot of heat which exhausts out the left hand side, so just be cautious of placing anything on this side.

Setting up the projector is simple and straightforward. After placing the projector below the center of your screen, plug it in, connect your input sources and/or soundbar, and turn it on using the remote or the power button on the side. The first time you turn it on, you’ll need to pair the projector and remote control. To do this, hold down the Home and Enter buttons on the remote until the indicator light on the remote flashes. Then use the focus lever to adjust the image until it is clear. Since we’re not using a screen, the image is projected directly onto the wall which is a flat, light green, however, you’ll notice that the colors actually look very natural. There are four customizable preset picture modes for different content and viewing conditions: Vivid, Cinema, Dynamic, and Natural.

If the image is skewed, its shape can be squared using the remote to adjust the corner positions. Warping due to waves or curves in your wall or screen can be corrected manually or with the Epson Setting Assistant mobile app. Simply take a photo of a calibration image with your phone’s camera and the app will automatically straighten out and flatten the image, which worked perfectly for me. Note that these adjustments can produce “over splash” where you have a black margin around your projected image.

The LS650 has built-in Android TV OS which starts up by default. To use integrated streaming services and apps, connect it to your WiFi (2.4 or 5 GHz) and log into a Google account, though note that there’s no Ethernet port for a wired connection. The machine has 13 GB of internal storage space for you to install apps and games, and you can add additional storage via the USB ports on the back. I was able to add streaming services from the Google Play Store including live TV apps right on the projector, like Disney+ and Hulu, but with the notable exception of Netflix. Since I’m using an Amazon FireTV stick via HDMI, I won’t really be using the built-in OS.

Chromecast is also built in so I can cast from my phone and computer that are connected to the same WiFi network. Google’s voice assistant is available too, though you’ll have to manually trigger it AI with the remote’s mic button, as the projector doesn’t have an always on mic to respond to a wake word. You could, however, link other Google Home devices to the projector to control it via voice.

The built-in speakers can fill a medium-sized room easily and have decent sound quality with balanced and well-rounded bass response. You can also output sound to an external speaker or sound system using the Optical output, or ARC device plugged into the port labeled HDMI 2. I connected my Sennheiser soundbar which supports Dolby Atmos and DTS surround sound and CEC, so I was able to control its volume using the projector’s remote. When the projector is powered on an off, the soundbar automatically follows suit. I also like that you can enable ""Bluetooth speaker mode"" to use the projector’s speakers as a wireless speaker. While I didn’t notice any lag, if you do experience a sync delay, you can compensate the output latency up to 200 ms in 10ms increments.

The unit has a motion detector as a safety measure that will shut off the projection if it detects motion in front of the lens to prevent the lasers from shining in your eyes and damaging them. It will also emit an audible alarm to alert you. This happens nearly instantly, but can be triggered accidentally if you wander too close to the sides of the screen. Your media will continue to play while the lasers are off, and when the sensor no longer detects movement, will return to normal operation.

While the image produced looked sharp and smooth across the entire screen, occasionally I’ll notice compression artifacts like blocking or blurry halos during fast-motion. You may be able to improve quality and stability by adjusting settings like frame interpolation, noise reduction, and super-resolution or improving your wireless connection speed and strength. Overall, the image quality is very good with a high contrast ratio of 2.5 million to 1 and 10-bit color depth for realistic and vivid colors.

For gaming, the projector is pretty good with an input lag of only 20ms making it fairly responsive to controller movements, but note that the max screen refresh rate is 60Hz. The one thing I didn’t like is that the remote control is not backlit making it difficult to see the buttons in the dark. I also noticed that the native Android TV interface sometimes feels sluggish versus the external FireTV input.

Overall, the EpiqVision LS650 projector delivers a very satisfying and enjoyable cinematic viewing experience complete with respectable audio performance as a standalone unit. When paired with a surround sound system, you can achieve an immersive movie theater-like experience at home whether you’re watching films, streaming live TV, or playing video games.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. #CommissionsEarned
Buy it at Amazon: Epson 4K UHD Short Throw Projector LS650 [Affiliate Link]