The $629.99 EX5280 3LCD XGA Projector is a step up in line from the $499.99 Epson EX3280, which earned our Editors’ Choice nod as an XGA (1,024-by-768) portable projector for business or education use in midsize rooms. In addition to features the two share, including vibrant color for presentations and the ability to show images from two sources on screen at once, the EX5280 offers slightly higher brightness and adds both an optical zoom and more ports. However, it doesn’t handle photorealistic images as well, and it’s a little hard to focus. It’s worth considering if you need one of its additional ports, but the EX3280 remains our Editors’ Choice.
Rainbow-Free
As a 3LCD projector, the EX5280 is built around three LCD chips, which gives it two inherent advantages over DLP projectors. You won’t see any rainbow artifacts, which is an important plus for anyone who finds them annoying. The image will also have equal white and color brightness, which means color images will be as bright as you would expect from the white brightness rating, and there won’t be any difference between the two that can affect color accuracy.
As with the EX3280, and unlike the higher-resolution Epson Pro EX9240, the chips the EX5280 uses are XGA (1,024-by-768), which is a low native resolution by today’s standards and limits the level of fine detail the projector can show. Lines in graphics, as well as text, tend to be noticeably less crisp than with higher resolutions, and smaller fonts that would be readable at a given screen size at 1080p (1,920-by-768) resolution will be hard or impossible to read at XGA. However, this is a serious problem only for line drawings with lots of thin, closely spaced lines or documents that use much smaller text than you’re likely to use in a presentation. I didn’t have any trouble reading the text in our standard business test documents and slides. Edges on characters were just a little less sharp than I’m used to seeing when using 1080p models.
The XGA resolution also translates to a 4:3 aspect ratio. If your images are designed for 16:9 1080p, they’ll either be distorted if you show them at 4:3, or will add letterboxing (black bars above and below the image) that lowers the effective brightness for the projector by blocking the light that would have fallen in those areas. This leaves you with the choice of having a smaller height for the image, making details and small fonts harder to read, or moving the projector further from the screen to get a larger image height, and losing image brightness. On the plus side, the XGA resolution is also at least partly responsible for the lower price compared to higher-resolution models.
One important advantage for the EX5280 is that it’s one of the lighter choices in Epson’s portable line, weighing 5.5 pounds. Even better, it measures only 3.2 by 11.9 by 9.3 inches and comes packed in a soft carrying case. It’s easy to find projectors that are significantly smaller and lighter, such as the AAXA P6X Pico Projector, but they’re not as bright. Note that the EX5280 is a close match to the EX3280 on this score, at only a few tenths of a pound heavier. It’s also a touch brighter, rated at 3,800 lumens compared with 3,600. But the roughly 6% boost in brightness makes little difference. The recommended ranges for screen sizes at any given level of ambient light for those two lumen ratings largely overlap.
Easy Setup, Except for Focus
Setup for the EX5280 is mostly easy, but one thing is harder than it should be. The easy part is that it requires little more than setting it in place, pointing it at the screen, connecting an image source and power cords, and manually focusing and adjusting the 1.2x zoom. The hard part is focusing. It takes so much force to get it the focus ring moving that it’s hard to control it.
I managed to get the lens close to its sharpest focus by getting an approximate focus first, then tapping on the little nub that sticks out perpendicular to the ring, but I’m not satisfied that I ever got the best possible focus over the entire image. Most of the image seemed as sharp as I could get it, but the bottom edges were a little softer than the rest, and there might have been a better compromise, if I had been able to find it.
Connection options are a step up from the minimal choices the EX3280 offers. Like its less-expensive cousin, the EX5280 has one VGA port, one HDMI port, and a USB Type B port that supports Plug and Play compatibility for PCs and Macs. It adds a composite video input along with left and right audio inputs using RCA connectors, and a USB Type A port. The composite video input may be useful if your cash-strapped school or business still relies on older (I’m tempted to say obsolete) video sources.
The USB Type-A port is more likely to be of interest. It will let you either read files from USB memory or add a $120 wireless LAN module. However, the LAN module comes with a cover to protect it from being stolen. And if you install the cover, it’s held in place by a screw, which renders the port inaccessible if you want to swap in a memory stick.
Note that the split-screen feature won’t support splitting between USB-A and USB-B input or between VGA and composite video input, but it lets you use any other combination and easily choose which image goes on which side of the screen.
The onboard 2-watt mono speaker offers usable sound quality at high enough volume for a small to midsize room. There’s no audio out port or Bluetooth, so if you need higher volume or better sound quality, you’ll need to connect an external sound system to the audio source rather than through the projector.
Vibrant Color for Graphics, Somewhat Watchable Video
The five color modes for the EX5280 all deliver vibrant color for graphics in presentations. Most also deliver acceptable color accuracy for photorealistic images. However, the quality for photorealistic images is only barely adequate for photos or short clips in a presentation.
Highlights in bright images tended to get blown in my tests, while low contrast and loss of shadow detail made darker photorealistic scenes look muddy, foggy, or nearly solid black in some areas, depending on the scene. Between these issues and the low resolution that necessarily gives photorealistic images a soft-focus look, it’s not the sort of projector you’d want to use for showing a movie unless image quality really isn’t required.
Among the five color mode presets, Presentation delivered the best balance of color accuracy, color saturation, and brightness, making it my preferred choice for presentations. Cinema and sRGB delivered the best color accuracy for graphics or photorealistic images. In addition, sRGB did the best job with shadow detail, making it my preferred choice for video or film, assuming it’s bright enough for the screen size and ambient light level.
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Based on the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, the 3,800-lumen rating is bright enough for a 266-inch diagonal, 1.0 gain, 4:3 screen in a dark room. In moderate ambient light, it’s bright enough for a 160-inch screen. In my tests, the lower brightness sRGB mode was easily bright enough to light up my 90-inch 1.0 gain screen in the dark, and remain usable, losing only a little color saturation, in moderate ambient light.
Worthwhile If You Need the Ports
If you don’t need one or more of the EX5280’s additional connection options, there is no good argument for paying extra for it, which leaves the EX3280 as our Editors’ Choice for an XGA portable business and education projector for midsize rooms. If you need the EX5280’s USB Type-A port, composite video, or the Wi-Fi option, however, it’s a perfectly reasonable choice, thanks to slightly higher brightness than the EX3280 and easily good enough image quality for business presentations and education use. That said, if your presentations include fine detail, consider the Epson Pro EX9240, which offers 1080p resolution and even higher brightness. Or, if you’re considering the EX5280 more for its portability than its brightness, you might want to look at the AAXA P6X, which isn’t nearly as bright, but offers a higher resolution, at 1,280 by 800, and weighs a lot less.
