Epson Home Cinema LS11000 4K Pro-UHD Laser Projector Review (2024)

The Epson Home Cinema LS11000 4K Pro-UHD Laser Projector joins the Epson Pro Cinema LS12000 as the second Epson model to deliver images with a 4K resolution—a full 3,840 by 2,160 pixels. The LS11000 has lower contrast and a white, rather than black, color, which makes it more appropriate for use in a room with lights on rather than off. That means the LS12000 remains our Editors' Choice pick for a 4K projector for a traditional home theater. But if you're looking for a projector for your family room, the $3,999 LS11000 will give you most of the same capabilities as its more expensive cousin, including good color accuracy, for $1,000 less.

Step Up to 4K in Your Family Room

As discussed in more detail in the LS12000 review, earlier versions of Epson's 4K Pro-UHD pixel-shifting technology deliver only half as many pixels on screen as are in a 3,840-by-2,160 pixel image. These versions are used in the Epson EpiqVision Ultra LS500 4K and the Epson Pro Cinema 4050, for example. It's hard see any difference at normal seating distances between what those projectors offer and the real thing, but it's still not really 4K.

The LS11000and LS12000 step up the pixel resolution to the full 3,840-by-2,160-pixel resolution that is commonly referred to as 4K. And as with all of Epson's pixel-shifting models, they add a high-quality glass lens (the same 15-element lens in both models) along with video processing to bring out even more detail.

The resulting resolution for the LS11000 in my tests was a match for what I saw with the LS12000. When standing one to two feet from the image, I could see details I've never seen in my tests with any of Epson's other projectors, or with any 4K DLP-based projector that uses TI's pixel shifting. It's unlikely you'll see any additional detail when using the projector, but if you like to sit closer than typical, or have better than normal eyesight, you might.

Keep in mind, too, that because of its three-chip design, the LS11000 isn't at risk of producing the red-green-blue flashes known as rainbow artifacts that some projectors are prone to displaying. Those who don't see them easily or don't mind them won't care, but for those who find them bothersome, this can be a critical issue.

Easy Setup With Power Lens Control

As with many of Epson's Home Cinema and Pro Cinema models, the LS11000 offers a set of sophisticated control features for the lens. They include a large zoom range, at 2.1x; large vertical and horizontal lens shifts (for moving the image position without moving the projector); and a lens memory to store up to 10 combinations of zoom, shift, and focus settings for easy retrieval. All of these features help make setup easy and add to the projector's flexibility for day-to-day viewing.

Starting from the centered position for the lens, the 47.1% horizontal shift in either direction can move the image nearly half a screen width left or right, while the 96.3% vertical shift either way can move it nearly a full screen height up or down. For setup, this offers the flexibility to position the projector either centered horizontally or offset to one side, and at heights ranging from a low or high shelf in the back of the room to inverted in a ceiling mount. Adding to ease of use is that focus and shift are powered, and are controlled from the remote with enough precision to easily adjust each.

Aside from helping to make setup easier, these powered settings (plus the ability to save multiple combinations of settings to memory for easy retrieval) make it easy to maintain a constant image height (CIH) setup. As discussed in more detail in our Epson Pro Cinema 4050 review, CIH setups give you the same image height for content with different aspect ratios. For home theater, this is most often used in combination with a Cinemascope (2.35:1 or 2.4:1) screen for switching among 16:9, 2.35:1, and 2.4:1 formats. Note that unlike the LS12000, the LS11000 does not support the alternative option of using an external anamorphic lens for CIH.

Partly because of the glass lens and the need for a heavy-duty mechanism that can hit the correct position when calling up settings from memory, the LS11000 is fairly hefty, at 28 pounds and 7.6 by 20.5 by 17.6 inches (HWD). It's rated at 2,500 lumens, which is a little lower than the LS12000's rating, but not enough so to notice. Either one is unusually bright for a traditional home theater setup in a dark room, and well into the level you'd want for a family room.

A more important difference between the two models is that the contrast rating for the LS11000, while good, is only about half the rating for the LS12000. (Keep in mind that different manufacturers use different approaches to rating contrast, which makes most comparisons meaningless. But the ratings can be useful when comparing two models from the same manufacturer.) The lower contrast won't matter much in a family room with ambient light, because the light will tend to wash out black levels, which hides the difference between good contrast and great contrast. But the difference will be obvious in a dark room, both in theory and based on my viewing tests.

In addition, with a white exterior—rather than sharing the LS12000's black color scheme—the LS11000 unit itself will tend to reflect light back at the screen. Here again, this won't matter much when viewing in ambient light, but in a dark room, it will lower the effective contrast on screen even further.

That said, based on Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, 2,500 lumens is bright enough for a 230-inch, 1.0-gain, 16:9 screen in a dark room. Various rule-of-thumb recommendations for HDR viewing bring the size down to 145 to 195 inches. For my tests, using Bright Cinema mode, the default 75% brightness setting was enough to light up a 130-inch screen in a dark room for both SDR and HDR viewing. For the level of light in a typical family room, the same settings worked nicely for a 100- to 110-inch screen.

As with many home theater projectors in this price range and above, the LS11000 doesn't include speakers. However, it offers eARC on one HDMI port, so you can connect to an external audio system.

Testing the LS11000: Good Out-of-Box Color Accuracy

The LS11000 menus offer five predefined picture modes for both SDR and HDR input. For SDR input, Dynamic mode was a touch green shifted, which is common for the brightest modes in most projectors. However, as with most Epson models, the shift was little enough that most people would consider it acceptable, at least on an occasional basis, on a bright day. In my tests, it was obvious only in a few of our test images that tend to make a green bias stand out.

All of the other modes deliver color accuracy good enough that few people would be able to spot any color errors without a reference image for comparison. All lost some shadow detail that I know should show up in our test clips, but not enough to make it hard to make out the scene, at least in a dark room. I picked Bright Cinema as my preferred mode, because it offered the best contrast and held shadow detail the best.

I also found I could improve contrast a bit with some slight tweaking of brightness and contrast settings. Note too that frame interpolation (FI), for smoothing motion, is on by default. But if you don't like the digital video (or soap opera) effect it adds to filmed material, it's easy enough to turn it off, then back on again for live or recorded video, where it tends to enhance the image.

For HDR input, the menus offer the same choices as for SDR. They also retain the same settings for both, but if you want to customize amode differently for HDR and SDR, you can save each customization to one of ten memory settings, and retrieve it easily when needed. Bright Cinema was my preferred choice for HDR as well. In my viewing tests with the 4K HDR movies in our test suite, the LS11000 delivered good color accuracy, contrast, and three dimensionality. (Note that there's no actual 3D support, though.)

For both SDR and HDR, details in dark scenes were hard to see on a white screen even in low levels of ambient light. However, switching to a 110-inch screen with ambient light rejection (ALR) and a gray background solved that problem. And keep in mind that it's a good idea to pair any projector with an ALR screen if you plan to use it in a family room. (See our guide on how to choose the right screen for your projector.)

The LS11000 offers a shorter input lag than most 4K projectors at full 4K resolution, essentially matching the LS12000. My measurements with a Bodnar meter came out to 19.4ms for 4K 60Hz input, which is suitable for all but the most serious gamers. The measured lag was longer for 1080p input, coming in at 38.6ms at 60Hz, and 28.7ms at 120Hz. But, as with the LS12000, Epson says the actual lag is the same at 1080p as at 4K, and the higher measurement at 1080p is due to the interaction between the Pro-UHD's approach to writing the image on the screen and the way the meter reads the lag.

Best for Rooms with Ambient Light

The Epson Home Cinema LS11000 manages to be both a lesser—and less expensive—variation on the LS12000 for traditional home theater and a better fit for a family room. Although you can use either projector for either application, the LS11000 won't give you the same dramatic visual impact as the LS12000 for dark scenes in a dark room. Conversely, paying extra for the LS12000's better contrast won't make much difference with ambient light.

If you're considering the LS11000 for a family room, be sure to compare it with the Epson 4050, which offers similar features at a lower price and is our current Editors' Choice pick in its price range for home theater. Also consider the Epson LS500, our current Editors' Choice award winner for an ultra-short-throw TV replacement. Neither puts as many pixels on screen as the LS11000 does, but it's unlikely you'll notice any difference in detail. Finally, if you aren't concerned about rainbow artifacts, also be sure to look at the BenQ V7050i and the Optoma CinemaX P2, which are often marketed as TV replacements.

On the other hand, if you insist on a guaranteed rainbow-artifact-free image, won't turn off the lights often enough to justify paying extra for the LS12000, and want a 4K UHD resolution on screen, the LS11000is the obvious choice.