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BenQ 4100i Review: Bringing the Cinema to Your Living Room
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.
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.