Best in Class – $2,000 - $5,000 Value Home Theater: BenQ HT5550

A big “thank you” goes out from Projector Reviews to BenQ. By bringing out the HT5550, BenQ has continued what I have always considered to be the best series of projectors in terms of price performance. Most significantly, this BenQ projector is a bright one, and offers better black level performance than any other DLP projector I can think of, anywhere near its price.

And, by bringing back this series we again see a market where one from this series projectors is  going up against one from the latest Epson UB series, for overall picture and handling of really dark scenes. “It’s those really dark scenes that separate serious home theater projectors from the run-of-the-mill.”

BenQ has been focusing on shipping their projectors with some really good color right out of the box, in the better modes. That’s to be commended. With this goal, they join companies like Sony and Epson, where we now anticipate some pretty good color without calibration. I’ve always really liked how DLP projectors tend to handle color in the dark scenes – I call that the DLP look and feel. The HT5550 has it!

The HT5550’s color will improve with a calibration, but not massively. Do try out our calibration settings, though – they’re “on the house” and found in the full review. It won’t take much more than 10 minutes to drop all the calibration settings for a couple of modes into your new BenQ.

With the HT5550, BenQ combines that really good color with some “ultra-high contrast” black levels. This is a term I use with projectors that can handle dark scenes well enough to achieve a level of quality where improvement in other areas is more important than even better blacks. The BenQ does very well on 1080p content, but it does especially well with 4K content with HDR.

BenQ provides good controls over “gamma,” which is officially EOTF in the world of HDR. I do find the HDR a bit too bright on some mostly very dark scenes, but with some mid-brightness areas. In that way, it differs from the UBs and some more expensive Sonys and JVCs. Still it looks good when doing that, though! For that reason, I tend to adjust the BenQ to one of the two lowest settings on EOTF. I find the end result most pleasing.