Gentlemen (and ladies) start your credit cards! The holiday shopping season is upon us. And one deal that caught our eye here at BPBS is the Epson Home Cinema 2100 home theater projector. It's currently on Amazon for $599.99 (save $300) but they're throwing in a $50 gift card bringing the net price down to $549.99 with free delivery. You'll pay $599.99, but will be sent a $50 Amazon Gift Card good for any future purchase.
Here's the link:
The Epson Home Cinema 2100 is unlike many other affordable HD projectors for two reasons: 2500 lumens of brightness and built-in lens shift. The brightness thing is important as it means you can watch movies, sports and TV shows on this thing without having to turn off all the lights or even draw the blinds. And with its 3LCD imaging engine, that brightness measure extends to both its color brightness and white brightness ratings. Inexpensive DLP projectors can usually get a pretty high peak brightness level on white images, but suffer from lower color brightness. Of course the picture on the Epson will look even better if you do draw the curtains, but if you're looking for something that's just as home in the living room for a superbowl party as it is in the back yard for outdoor movie nights, the Home Cinema 2100 is a great choice.
The lens shift feature alows you to position the projector on a coffee table, ceiling or rear shelf and get a perfectly uniform image without any geometric distortion. Most inexpensive projectors lack lens shift which means you have to be very precise where you mount it or you'll have to resort to using digital keystone controls. With keystone controls, you can get a squared off image but at the expense of picture quality - it robs you of many of those all-important pixels. We've never seen a projector with lens shift for such a low price.
Also, because of its HD resolution and high brightness, you can get a high quality image up to 132 inches diagonal (or more, if you have a really large room). Yes, that's 11-feet from corner to corner - that's over four times the screen size of a 65-inch traditional TV.
You can use the money saved toward a nice sound bar or a full surround sound system. The Home Cinema 2100 does have a built-in speaker with 10 Watts of power, but for a picture this big and beautiful, we recommend springing for sound that will match the on-screen action. Our choice for an affordable sound bar? The Klipsch Reference Series R-4B for $149.99. It's not fancy, but it offers great sound quality for only $150.
If you want an upgraded option, go with the Sonos PlayBar. It's a powerful 3-channel soundbar that includes the Sonos multi-room music platform. It's also on sale this week for $100 off ($599). You can start with the PlayBar and add on a powered sub and rear speakers for full 5.1-channel surround sound.
For a screen, you can use the wall, but a real projection screen will offer much better image quality. We'd recommend the Silver Ticket screen which comes in 100-inch and 120-inch sizes. It's a great screen for not much money and the top recommendation from our friends over at the Wirecutter as well. They currently come with a free projector mount for your ceiling ($20 value).
Here are the options:
The sales price and gift card offer on the Epson projector ends on Monday, November 27, or while supplies last:
