Home > Consumer Reviews > Epson EMP-TW20 Dreamio LCD Home Projector

My 14 inch cheapo TV broke, so I looked for a named replacement only to find that all I could get was flat screen 14 inchers that cost £200 upwards and I thought if I was going to be spending that kind of money I ought to get myself something different to every other set in the house, so I bought this off of Pixmania through Amazon. Some sites are charging up to £650 for the same unit.

I have a fairly small bedroom, maybe 7' by 8' and the fact that I now have an 85" picture on my wall I find phenomenal, insane, wonderous. You can't get a TV that size and it cost me less than you can spend on a 28" TV. If you already have normal TV sets around the house get this for at least one room so you can watch things big, or pick it up, put it in the car take it to your friends house to watch things big, it's not as if you could move a large Lcd or Plasma so easily.

The unit comes with English instructions and a cable that converts any scart plug into something that can be plugged into the unit. I think I may get a screen for my wall as if there are cracks in the wall, screws for pictures and all that stuff it does distract if you let it. The on board speaker is good but you really need something extra for movies. The room has to be dark. If you are going to have the scren as large as possible the concentration of light is not enough for the projector to be any good in anything other than a dimly lit room, but that just gets you in the mood for the movie. The unit does hum a fair bit but nothing you can't mentally block out or drown out with decent speakers. My old Xbox is louder. The units horizontal shift feature isn't quite as good as I had hoped, only offsetting the picture to one side by may be a foot or so. The instructions also tell you not to use the units in Bedrooms as bedrooms are dustier than most other rooms and dust can block the air vent and make the unit over heat. The good thing being that the unit tells you if it's overheating so it doesn't break, you just have to clean the air filter with a vaccum cleaner.

The bulb lasts 2000 hours and costs around £120 to replace, but that is still a 2 hour movie every night for 3 years, which is a hell of a lot of movie watching. That's 6p per hour to turn an evenings film viewing into a Blockbuster Movie epic on your wall, not bad.

In short get it. The worst that can happen is that you get a massive smile on your face and your family turn into some kind of Mole people through spending so much time in the dark.

I have only known Epson to make printers up until now and because you'd expect them to be better at making printers than projectors then you're wrong. It has a very reasonable bulb brightness 1200ansi Lumens (which I have no idea what this means apart from how bight it is.) and automatic keystone correction to make sure that where the projector is mounted that the image will not appear slanted etc. moreover it has the ability to be mounted upside down on the ceiling. Furthermore it has the facility to shift the lens left and right so the projector can be off centre but the image is still centred, making that little bit easier to mount and place of you have an awkward living space. The picture quality is great for the price, you get all the connections you could need even serial for some strange reason. Overall a great product and well worth £400 over a 42" plasma TV because with this you can make the picture as big or as small as u like and its portable so you could even take it to you grans and show them you're holiday photos or whatever on a really big screen. Or even play on your Xbox or Playstation whichever console you happen to own.

I have no previous experience with projectors and so I cannot compare with other products. However, this one is fabulous, especially in a small room, because the zoom (wide angle) allows you to place a very big image from a relatively short distance away (10 feet). I have tried it using a scart from the DVD, and also using S-Video directly from my computer. Both work well, although it can depend on your computer's virtual DVD player - it can require some messing about with settings, but this is the computer's fault, not the projector's.

The lens settings also allow you to not have it directly in front, which is also handy. Combined with my 5.1 decoder sound, it is totally amazing. Best viewed with the curtains closed and all the lights off.

The only slight limitation I would mention, is that I see that the price has now gone up by about £160 since I bought it a week ago...lucky me :)

The tw20 dreamio lcd projector is now selling for £145 more than it was 2 months ago - Pixmania were supplying it through Amazon for £399

Purchased probably 2 years ago. Not sure if still in production, I believe I paid just over £400 and I consider this has been fantastic value for money. No breakdowns and no new lamp needed so far. I use in a small room (6 foot throw) onto approx. 80" X 39" piece of hardboard fastened to the wall with several layers of standard white Matt Emulsion: which works really well. I mainly use for XBox - Gears of War & Call of Duty 3 - fantastic with an inexpensive Philips surround sound system (about £120) - you are virtually part of the game:an amazing experience. Also great for films - I lower the screen size to about 50 inches. Cannot recommend it enough.