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Epson does movie night on the cheap

Epson's PowerLite Home Cinema 730HD is a very cheap and very bright projector, which should have all the features you need for an impromptu movie night.

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He majored in Cinema Studies when studying at RMIT. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials
  • Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
Ty Pendlebury
2 min read
Epson

If you had to list the reasons why you haven't bought a projector yet, what would they be? They're not bright enough? Don't have a dedicated space? Expensive?

Well, Epson could have an answer for all of these problems with its 730HD projector, which boasts a very bright lamp (3000 lumens) and it's cheap. For such a bright lamp, it has a fairly long life of 4,000 hours -- or equivalent to five years of movie nights.

At $649, the Epson is the same price as a cheap 50-inch LCD and capable of an image twice that size.

The projector is also designed to be portable and comes with adjustable feet so you don't have to resort to propping it up on rickety piles of magazines. The lens features a 1.2x optical zoom, automatic vertical keystone, and "easy-slide" horizontal correction for easier setup.

Nobody wants to drag a set of speakers out to the garage, so naturally the 730HD comes with an onboard 2W speaker.

The projector boasts a 720p definition and is based on 3LCD technology, which means none of the distracting rainbow effects you'll see on cheap DLP projectors.

The Epson comes with a modest selection of inputs including HDMI, S-Video, and VGA for video plus analog stereo audio. It also comes with two USB ports for displaying pictures.

The only thing it's missing is an MHL slot for the Roku Streaming Stick, but there's always the Google Chromecast.

The PowerLite Home Cinema 730HD will be available in September 2013