Excellent color and contrast. Great filmmaker mode. Easy Android setup. Cinematic 24P mode with theatrical frame-rate matching.

Easy setup does not work on iPhone. HDMI ports are a bit confusing.

For the Netflix crowd, setting up a movie theater in your house makes perfect sense. When a big release like Apex starring Charlize Theron or the fantastic sci-fi series The Boroughs comes out, you can dim the lights, start the popcorn machine, and sit back and watch. The BenQ W4100i is a great option for this setup, with rich colors and excellent contrast. Several features, including a phenomenal filmmaker mode and 24P frame rate mode, are fine-tuned to please die-hard movie fans. The fact that it’s easy to set up is an added bonus.

The W4100i has many excellent rivals, however. The movie-friendly Leica Cine Play 1 costs almost exactly the same, and the $3,800 Epson Lifestudio Grand Plus is no slouch in terms of brightness, clarity and AI enhancements. My goal was to see if the BenQ W4100i, priced at $2,999 (or $2,799 on sale), can come out on top.

Easy Setup

The BenQ W4100i’s all-black, rectangular design has the look of a home theater projector from 15 years ago, but that’s not a ding. I prefer the aluminum-clad Leica Cine Play 1 design better, but the W4100i blends into the background nicely and is barely visible with the lights off.

Weighing about 22 pounds, the W4100i is built as a stationary long-throw projector. I placed the W4100i on a table facing the wall. There are three HDMI ports on the back, an optical out, and a 2.5-amp USB-A port for charging gadgets. I wish the HDMI eARC port was more clearly labeled. It's marked as “Audio Relay” and is assigned to HDMI 2 instead of HDMI 1, which can be confusing.

I loved the old-school levers near the lens for adjusting focus and throw distance because you don’t have to fiddle with the remote. Curiously, the Android TV dongle didn’t come preinstalled behind a removable back panel. It's easy to set up, and BenQ says the W4100i is designed for home-theater enthusiasts who are likely to use their own HDMI-connected devices. Even so, it feels a little odd when all you want to do is launch Netflix and start watching.

The OS setup was the easiest I’ve encountered on any recent projector. I don’t mind that it uses the older Android TV system instead of Google TV, as the interface feels identical. One advantage of the Epson Lifestudio Grand Plus’s newer Google TV platform is its built-in Gemini support, which the BenQ lacks.

Google Assistant on the W4100i is still useful. Using a Samsung Galaxy S26+ phone, I asked Google Assistant to set up the projector, and everything was configured and running in a few minutes. All my preferred apps were loaded. This easy setup does not work on an iPhone, so you have to initiate setup using your Google login. Google Assistant isn’t as advanced as Gemini, but it can still generate slideshows on almost any topic with voiceover narration. BenQ may also upgrade this model to Google TV in the future.

The BenQ W4100i (mostly) adjusted the keystone and size for both my projector screen as well as a wall in my living room. I had to make the image just a hair straighter, but I do prefer how the Leica Cine Play 1 seems to magically size the image automatically.

The BenQ W4100i remote was a joy to use. I appreciated the abundance of dedicated buttons for accessing the projector's advanced settings, yet the remote never felt cluttered or confusing. It was also easy to adjust picture quality using a row of buttons at the bottom of the remote. Unlike most smart projectors that support streaming, there are no dedicated buttons for any apps.

Specs on the BenQ W4100i are impressive. The 3,200 lumens of brightness brings movies to life, even in a room that wasn’t completely dark. The projector hits 100 percent of both the Rec.709 and DCI-P3 color gamut and supports HDR10+. BenQ includes settings like Dynamic Black, tone and contrast enhancers, and CinematicColor to help improve contrast, black levels, and color variance.

Even though image quality on the W4100i is above average, it fell short of some competing options. Colors were more vibrant and had more dynamic range on Samsung’s The Frame Pro 2026. On the W4100i, a scene with light green grass appeared to look slightly brown instead. Similarly, mist over a mountain scene lacked definition. And both the Epson Lifestudio Grand Plus and the Leica Cine Play 1 delivered brighter, more realistic reds and yellows in scenes with flowers. Skintones lack variation and subtlety, though contrast was significantly better than on the TCL NXTVISION.

In Predator: Badlands, the main character’s alien skin rendered fine on the W4100i, but the image wasn’t as convincing or detailed as on the Epson Pro Cinema LS9000, which remains my reference point for this scene, thanks to its exceptional texture and lifelike detail. Where the W4100i shines is with contrast, as details in darker and dimly lit areas o scenes from Awake and The Creator were still clear and visible, thanks to BenQ’s screen tech. BenQ’s rendering matched what I’ve seen in movie theaters.

I was also impressed by the W4100i’s color reproduction in The Boroughs. A red muscle car popped with rich colors, while expansive blue skies looked vivid. However, a scene in Jack Ryan: Ghost War was a bit too grayed out, and Avatar: Fire and Ash didn’t look quite as sunning as on the Epson LS9000. While the W4100i falls short of the very best projectors on the market, you really can’t go wrong with BenQ’s offering for watching theatrical movies.

Using AirPlay to watch The Bride using the HBO Max app on my iPhone, the audio synced perfectly with no buffering. An NBA playoff game streamed on YouTube TV looked absolutely stunning with vivid colors. The tense drama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You looked cinematic, vivid, and pristine in filmmaker mode played on an Xbox Series X using a 4K UHD Blu-Ray disc.

My favorite feature on the BenQ W4100i is the 24 frames-per-second playback, which gives movies a more cinematic appearance. You can enable this movie mode in settings, and it pushed my overall opinion higher. All movies and shows had a movielike feel that justified BenQ’s price.

Immersive Gaming Experience

Gaming on the W4100i is extremely immersive. With 007: First Light, which I tested on an Alienware 16X Aurora (2026) gaming laptop, the James Bond action game looks just like a movie. An ocean-side scene with rocky cliffs is strikingly realistic and immediately pulled me into the action.

A similar ocean scene in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II reveals exceptional clarity across the entire image, running at 240 Hz for smooth, lifelike motion. That same scene can look washed out on a low-contrast television, but here it appeared vivid and clear. Projected onto my living room wall, it felt like I was playing a video game in a movie theater.

Similarly, I enjoy the anime-inspired visuals of NTE. Scenes like standing on the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, looking out at the ocean with ships in the distance at high resolution, are very immersive—you can almost feel the wind on your face. The high frame rate makes NTE smooth and responsive, with no lag.

Even when I was gaming during the day in a room with windows on a bright, sunny afternoon, the image was very clear and visible. I could make out details in the white snow as I was winding through the streets and up the mountains of Japan in Forza Horizon 6.

The BenQ W4100i comes in just a notch below the top projectors I've tested recently, including the Leica Cine Play 1 and the Epson Pro Cinema LS9000. It's almost there. The colors are exceptional, and it works well, even in a bright room. While I found some flaws, I loved the easy setup, useful remote, and brilliant colors. It’s a serious contender.