During its more than 50-year history, the company Lg was able to take a leading position among manufacturers of household appliances and electronics. She is doing especially well in the TV screen market – LG produces the best OLED– TV sets, which are especially loved in our editorial office and among many users of our site. Today we will talk about other screens – projection, or rather about the sources that give out the picture on such canvases – projectors. Most recently, LG provided us with one of the top-end devices in this category for testing – an ultra short throw projector. LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS… The official price for this premium device in Russia as of February 2023 is 419,990 rubles…
PACKAGING AND COMPLETE SET
LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS comes in a cardboard box with colorful printing. From the side where you need to open the package, the projector itself is shown, which projects the image of the evening city on the water. On the sides there are also images of the device, the logos of the LG company, as well as the model name. No technology logos like on TV and monitor packaging.
Inside, the projector is protected from above and below with textured foam, and is also wrapped in a foam polyethylene bag. In addition to the LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS itself, in the box you will find a user manual, protective pads, a power cable and, of course, a Magic remote control with backlight, two AA batteries and a separate manual for the remote control.
APPEARANCE, CONNECTORS AND CHARACTERISTICS
Surely many dreamed at one time about a device that would make it possible to arrange a cinema right at home. The advent of ultra-short throw laser projectors has brought this dream closer, as it is now enough to place the projector on the floor or cabinet directly in front of the screen / wall. The LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS is one of such solutions.
The dimensions of the projector are 680 × 347 × 128 mm and outwardly it resembles an old VCR. And its weight is appropriate – 12.2 kg. The body is predominantly made of white matte plastic and only the bottom is gray. On the front side, it is covered with a gray mesh fabric, which hides two speakers of 5 W each, as well as an LED in the lower right corner that glows red when the device is in standby mode. The built-in analog joystick for turning on and controlling without a remote control is located on the bottom of the projector not far from the LED. On the left and right along the entire area of the sides of this projector, there are ventilation grilles for intake and exhaust of air, which is taken in from the left using a ~ 90-mm fan and exits from the right side. At the bottom, the manufacturer placed 4 swivel legs to adjust the position of the screen in the case of not the most perfectly flat floor or cabinet. Overall, LG’s design is pretty good.
The manufacturer has placed all interfaces and connectors on the back side. In addition to the power connector, there are two HDMI 2.0b ports on the back with HDCP 2.2 support for playing protected 4K content. The first HDMI port also supports HDMI ARC for delivering Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD audio to external speakers and a receiver. Under the HDMI connectors there are 2 USB 2.0 Type-A ports for connecting external drives or a keyboard and mouse. Next door is a USB Type-C connector for connecting to PCs and smartphones that support this type of connection.
An optical connector is also provided for connecting external acoustics, and for wired Internet there is an RJ-45 port. You can protect your device with the provided Kensington security system.
On top of the projector there is an oblong triangular recess, where part of the space is occupied by glass, from which the projection light is emitted. Nearby is a compartment with a focus wheel, which opens when you press the cover on the left side.
As for the filling, the LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS uses a three-channel laser of two colors – red and blue. The third laser is also blue, but when it reacts with a phosphor, it gives a green color. As a result, the projector has a DCI-P3 color gamut of about 97%. Thanks to support for XPR technology, the manufacturer managed to achieve 4K resolution with a refresh rate of 60 Hz, as well as the ability to upscale up to 4K and display content with HDR10. For a home projector, the LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS has a fairly high brightness of 2,700 lumens and a contrast ratio of 2,000,000: 1.
REMOTE, INSTALLATION, SETTING AND SMART FEATURES
As with most LG TVs in recent years, the LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS comes with a Magic Remote that connects to the device via a 2.4 GHz radio channel and has pointer functionality for easy navigation, as well as a microphone for voice commands. and convenient search.
The main differences from the standard Magic Remote are the backlighting of almost all buttons on the remote control, as well as the white front side and the button (left at the very bottom) for quick access to the projector menu settings. Since we received a sample for the European market, it has buttons for quick access to Netflix and Amazon services, but not Russian ones like ivi. In general, we cannot say anything bad about the remote control, since over the years of using it with LG TVs it has never failed. A particularly convenient pointer function makes it easier to navigate menus and smart applications, and the voice assistant understands the speaker without any problems with a clear voice request.
Let’s proceed directly to installing and configuring the projector.
LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS can be installed in the traditional way on the floor or cabinet, or suspended from the ceiling. Four types of projection are available in the settings: forward conventional and ceiling projections, as well as their reverse options. To project the image, you need at least a flat 2 meter wide matt white wall, or ideally a specialized gray reflective screen with a diagonal of at least 90 inches. To do this, you need to place the projector at a distance of 5 cm from the projected surface, although you still will not put it closer, as the wires will interfere. The maximum diagonal supported in focus is 120 inches, but for this you have to increase the distance from the surface by another 13 cm.Unfortunately, we only had a wall, but not matte white, but with glossy white wallpaper and ornaments in the form of gray and black stripes … As an alternative, there was also a white paper background, which we use for photography, but it turned out to be not perfectly flat, which made the image float and it was simply impossible to align it.
Since we have limited space, we installed the LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS next to the wall to project a 90-inch screen on a 31 cm wide table-book, where the projector legs fit without any problems, and using a regular building level we aligned its position. However, even with the level position of the legs, some distortions were noticed at the corners of the image. Here we were helped by the function “Align to the screen”, which allows you to manually adjust the position of the screen by 12 points using the remote control and align distorted places. If the image seems blurry, then you need to tweak the focus, but it is worth noting that at the edges of this projector the focus is slightly lost and as a monitor it is hardly suitable for work, show presentations at most, play and, of course, consume video content.
As on TVs, here LG traditionally uses its proprietary webOS shell. OS version 4.5 is available out of the box. The operating system offers many popular content delivery applications, like the foreign services already mentioned on the remote control, as well as domestic ones, such as Wink and KinoPoisk HD. Over the years, the LG Content Store has grown a lot and offers a huge number of applications for a wide variety of tastes and even some simple games. The OS also allows you to watch content from external drives thanks to a built-in player, broadcast an image from a smartphone using Miracast support and surf the Internet through a built-in browser when the device is connected via wire or Wi-Fi.
IMAGE AND TESTS
The projector allows you to choose from several preset viewing modes. Some are for SDR content and others are for HDR content. There are modes for various video content, such as sports or cinema, or a game mode, as well as an option with artificial addition of HDR effects or expert parameters with an emphasis on cold or warm colors.
High-quality color reproduction is more difficult for projectors to achieve than TVs and monitors, unless, of course, you are in the ideal environment for them – a dark room with a high-quality canvas. In general, under minimal lighting conditions, the “Cinema” mode performed best, offering a warm picture with fairly accurate colors.
We tested the projector both in complete darkness at night with curtained windows and excluding all unnecessary light sources, as well as in artificial lighting and with daylight from the windows.
As mentioned above, due to the lack of a recommended screen, we, unfortunately, were unable to meet the ideal conditions for the test. However, even so, in a daytime living room, light scenes look very bright. But there are still problems. And as you might have guessed, these are dark scenes. Since the projector cannot shine in black, this parameter depends solely on the shading of the projection surface. As a result, it is extremely uncomfortable to watch night scenes of films during the day – you have to wait for the sunset or use curtains that do not let light through.
The noise from the projector is on average 37-39 dB, but it is not audible when watching the content. The built-in speakers will be enough for the first time, but for such a screen it is still worth buying at least a good sound system.
In terms of gaming capabilities, as we said, the LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS has a gaming mode. During testing, we recorded a response of 39 ms, which is quite common for such solutions. Also in the settings of the projector there is a mode “instant response in the game”, which is activated only when the games are launched on devices with support. This mode works seamlessly with Xbox Series X and PC, but is not supported on PlayStation 5. On the first two, the response became noticeably better, but when testing games on PS5, the delay was noticeable. We’ve also tested HDR on projects like Gears 5 (XSeX), Forza Horizon 4 (XSeX), Cyberpunk 2077 (PC), The Medium (XSeX), Demon’s Souls (PS5), and Control (PS5). On all platforms, we noticed an increase in contrast and image detail.
RESULTS
The LG CineBeam 4K Laser HU85LS is a good premium 4K projector that combines excellent color performance with HDR support, a time-tested shell and easy-to-use remote control, and gaming features designed to improve latency issues. A similar diagonal of 120 inches among TVs will cost several million rubles. Unfortunately, this is still not a device for everyone due to the high price tag. To fully exploit the possibilities, you also need a quality screen to improve your dark scene problems, and good acoustics to fully immerse you in the theater experience.
Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)
Read also: Review of the powerful gaming laptop ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 (GA503Q)…
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