Editor's Note: The Epson Pro EX10000 is a stripped-down version of Epson's PowerLite L250F (white) and PowerLite L255F (black) that is available through select retail distribution. The Pro AV versions, at slightly higher cost, share similar specs but add extra signage and installation features including built-in edge blending, split screen capabilities, and content management software/apps.

It may not be the cheapest or most powerful business projector available, but the Epson Pro EX10000 laser projector does a lot with a little by squeezing more than 4,500 lumens of light out of a small and light case. Whether it's for presentations of sales figures, a zoom conference with remote employees or watching the next online ad campaign, the Pro EX10000 comes through with a low maintenance laser design, built-in Wi-Fi, and a wide 1.6X zoom lens.

That said, the projector's three wide-XGA LCD imaging chips achieve the rated full HD resolution by using Epson's pixel shifting technology. That leads in this case to soft focus on some content compared with native 1080p projectors. But all in all, at $1,299, the Pro EX10000 is a bargain for those who need an affordable projector that can be easily moved around and has the brightness to host a lights-on/shades-up presentation.

Features

The Epson Pro EX10000 is small considering its brightness rating and all it can do, and it's a snap for one person to set up. It measures just 12.8 x 11.8 x 4.1-inches and weighs under 10 pounds. The Pro EX10000's lens is protected by a slide-open cover that doubles as an AV mute switch and the projector includes a padded carrying case.

Under the skin, the Pro EX10000's solid-state light path starts with a powerful blue diode laser. The beam uses a phosphor wheel and a dichroic mirror to deliver individual red, blue and green light streams that are aimed at the projector's three 0.62-inch polysilicon LCD panels. As noted, in an unusual twist for a 1080p Epson (or any other claimed 1080p projector today), the imaging chips are native 1366x768 resolution and doubled with Epson's pixel-shifting technology to achieve the full HD pixel count on screen. In this case, the projected images are steady and solid, but small characters can exhibit a soft focus. On the plus side, the Pro EX10000's three-chip architecture guarantees equal color and white brightness and zero rainbow artifacts, both being potential issues with the single-chip DLP projectors it directly competes with.

Just about maintenance free, the Pro EX10000's dust filter has been designed to last the projector's rated lifespan of 20,000 hours under normal conditions. You will need to vacuum the projector's input duct periodically, however. If you need to change the filter it takes about a minute and a replacement costs $17.

Like others in its class, the Pro EX10000 has a permanently attached lens. It's a versatile 1.6X zoom that can handle a variety of conditions and its image can go from 40-inches to over 41-feet, although it works best at up to about 20-foot images. That means it can be used in anything from a large presentation room or small auditorium to a school's lecture hall or a repurposed warehouse. The action of the Pro EX10000's lens ring is steady and precise but you can't adjust the zoom or focus from its remote control.

The projector can create a 100-inch image from between 9.8 feet and 15.9 feet from the screen, depending on the zoom level. You can check the throw distance for your preferred screen size with ProjectorCentral's Epson EX10000 calculator. Its optics only lost 7.4 percent of the projector's brightness when fully zoomed in.

In addition to electronic vertical and mechanical horizontal keystone correction, the Pro EX10000 takes image tweaking a step further with Arc and Point Correction. Its automatic vertical correction is perfect if the projector will get frequently moved.

Under the skin, the Pro EX10000 has a slew of options to make it run exactly the way you want it to. Epson's menu, with the main categories on the left and the details on the right, puts everything in your face without being overwhelming. The general Image settings category reveals the usual options (Brightness, Contrast, Color Saturation) along with the ability to crank up the pixel-shift image enhancement as needed. Unusually, the Pro EX10000 allows the adjustment of the projector's white balance at 14 different color temperatures. In addition to a Frequently Used Items category, the Pro EX10000 has settings for Signal I/O (source, microphone volume and the orientation of the image), Display (showing the projector's four test patterns and adding a start-up screen with the institution's logo) and Network (Wi-Fi or Ethernet connections). There's an ECO setting for reducing the projector's output and electricity usage.

In addition to the projector's 10-button control panel, it has status LEDs for Wi-Fi, laser illumination and overheating. Much of the panel is mirrored on the Pro EX10000's small but thick remote control. Its 37 keys include the expected on/off button and A/V mute, but also allow changing the projector's color mode and input sources. It uses two AA batteries and had a 32-foot range, though the keys lack backlighting to help in the dark.

There's a rich assortment of connections, including a pair of HDMI 1.4 inputs that accept up to 4K signals for display at the Pro EX10000's native resolution, though it can't make use of HDR encoding to boost contrast the way some 1080p home theater projectors can. In addition to connecting to a computer using a composite video input, the projector has two VGA source ports, one of which doubles as a pass-through monitor-out port, which can be helpful to feed a secondary in-room display or overflow room.

While the Pro EX10000 lacks Bluetooth to wirelessly send audio to external speakers, it has a 3.5-millimeter jack for wired audio output as well as set of RCA inputs and a pair of 3.5-millimeter audio inputs. There's a handy microphone jack that can turn the Pro EX10000's 16-watt speaker into a room-wide PA system.

The Pro EX10000 has RS-232 serial and RJ-45 networking ports for remotely controlling the projector, but not surprisingly for a projector at this price point, the Pro EX10000 lacks an HDBaseT connection for long-distance control runs or to grab video off a network. There are both Type A and Type B USB ports. I was able to project images and video from a USB flash drive and used the Pro projector to show converted presentation slides. But unlike some competitors, it can't directly display Microsoft Office files or Adobe Acrobat documents, and it lacks an integrated Web browser to do things like directly display Google Docs files.

Nevertheless, the hidden gem here is the projector's built-in 802.11AC Wi-Fi. Unlike many competitors that lack a Wi-Fi option or charge upwards of $100 for a dongle, wireless data access is baked right into the Pro EX10000. Over the course of two weeks of daily use, I mirrored the screens of Windows 10 notebooks, tablets and phones using Miracast and Epson's iProjection app. The app, which is available for both iPhone and Android, also let me turn my Samsung Galaxy S9 phone into a remote control for the projector.

With a network-connected computer, I was in control of the Pro EX10000. After typing the projector's IP address into a browser window, I was able to change the live input, adjust the volume and turn the projector on or off. It also works with Crestron control software.

In addition to a printed Quick Set Up guide, the Pro EX10000 includes a thorough, downloadable 257-page manual. It comes with a 1-year warranty, which pales in comparison to five-year warranties included with, for example, Sony and Sharp NEC projectors.

Setup

The Epson Pro EX10000 is flexible when it comes to mounting with nine threaded attachment points underneath that should mate with just about any ceiling hardware. It worked well with a generic bracket and Epson sells a $130 mounting kit. There's also a cool track lighting mounting option that works in rooms with commercial lighting strips from Halo, Juno or Global Trac Tek. It costs $252 and can draw power for the projector from the track.

The Pro EX10000 has adjustable feet upfront and at the back corners. This eases leveling and aiming the projector on a table, shelf or nook. All told, it took about three minutes to get a tolerable 50-inch image on the test bench.

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Its electronic vertical keystone correction and mechanical horizontal keystone correction can fix the image for angles up to 30-degrees. The horizontal keystone correction uses a slider just behind the lens that felt loose on my sample, and there's no way to lock its setting in place. Epson's Quick Corner software can make quick work of getting a rectangular image by combining the projector's horizontal and vertical correction methods into a simple visual method that involves pulling or pushing the image's corners. It took less than a minute to square things up. At a vertical angle of 15 degrees, the keystone correction lowered the projector's output by 22% percent.

There are three lighting modes, including Normal (brightest), Quiet (lower lighting and fan level) and Extended (lower brightness but full fan power). The Pro EX10000 also has a custom lighting mode that let me adjust the projector's output in 1-percent increments.

Performance

The Epson Pro EX10000 was quick off the block, projecting an image in 4.9 seconds. It shut itself down in 1.7 seconds. In other words, it should do well for stop and go use in an office, school or church. It can automatically go from standby to projecting when a live HDMI source is connected.

Its five Color Modes include Dynamic, Presentation, Cinema, sRGB and a Blackboard mode for use with a green chalk board. It lacks anything like a Rec. 709 mode that mimics the output of flat screen displays, but sRGB comes close enough. One clear omission is a DiCom Sim mode for viewing medical scans.

In its Dynamic mode, our sample of the Pro EX10000 put out 5,180 ANSI lumens, 15 percent over its 4,500-lumen rating, making it one of the brightest projectors in its class. That said, the Dynamic mode favors green tones over red in its images, which can lend a ghoulish cast. It's got enough brightness to leave the lights fully on but is better for presentations than for viewing a movie or photographs of natural scenes.

The Presentation mode adds in some pink shades but the output drops to a still bright 4,473 ANSI lumens. The Cinema mode makes everything look too warm and lowered output further to 3,997 ANSI lumens, while the Blackboard mode lowered brightness to 2,843 ANSI lumens but is too red for any other use. Overall, the best balance between color balance and brightness came from the Pro EX10000's sRGB mode at 3,736 ANSI lumens.

When it was blasting light, the Pro EX10000 topped out at 204.3 watts of power; it used 1.3 watts when idle. If you pay the U.S. average of 13 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity and use the projector for eight hours a day for 200 days a year, expect that the Pro EX10000 will cost about $44 a year to use.

That can be lowered by about one-third if you use the Pro EX10000's Quiet mode but at the cost of 20 percent less light. The Extended mode can make the laser light source last longer by lowering output by 22 percent while keeping the fan at full blast. Both use less electricity than Normal mode.

For a general-purpose business projector, the Pro EX10000 is on the quiet side. At its loudest, in Dynamic mode, I measured 43.5dBA of fan noise 36-inches from the projector. That's a little louder than I measured for the LG ProBeam BU60PST (42.5dBA) but much quieter than Sony's VPL-PHZ60 (47.2dBA). The appropriately named Quiet mode reduced noise in my casual measurement to 38.4dBA while the projector's Extended mode had a high noise reading of 42.9dBA. Epson rates the projector at 36- and 27-dB for the Normal and Quiet modes using the industry-standard averaged measurement in a sound-isolation booth.

During two weeks of intensive work, the Pro EX10000 never got above 111 degrees Fahrenheit. Plus, because it is lit by a laser, the projector can be pointed in any direction, even straight down, with no concerns about its ventilation.

Conclusion

Regardless of whether it's for a company's conference room, a school's lecture hall or a small house of worship, Epson's Pro EX10000 delivers over 5,000 lumens of light in a small and light package that should need little or no maintenance over its lifetime. Compared with some other 1080p projectors we've tested in this price range, such as the BenQ LH710, it is both brighter and cheaper while also including an important amenity with its built-in Wi-Fi. On the other hand, it saves money in part by opting for lower resolution imaging chips and applying pixel-shifting that may be visible as soft focus to critical viewers on some fine characters and details. But overall, the Pro EX10000 is a bright performer that does so on the cheap, likely making it a hit among bottom line conscious organizations.

Measurements

Brightness. Using the Pro EX10000's Dynamic and Normal modes, our sample delivered 5,180 ANSI lumens of light to the screen, or about 15 percent over its 4,500-lumen spec. The price to pay for this amount of light is an overwhelmingly green cast that makes flesh tones and natural scenes look odd and other-worldly. In Presentation mode, the overall image is warmed up but at the expense of the brightness dropping to 4,473 ANSI lumens. By using the Cinema mode, the color balance is pushed heavily towards red, and brightness dropped to 3,997 ANSI lumens. The sRGB setting represents a nice compromise with 3,736 ANSI lumens on tap for flesh tones and natural scenes. Finally, the Pro EX10000 has a Blackboard mode that, despite its name, is for use with green chalk boards in a classroom or business brainstorming sessions. It blasts the screen with pink to compensate and delivered 2,843 ANSI lumens. Below are the brightness measurements for the different picture modes and laser power settings.

Epson Pro EX10000 ANSI Lumens

Mode	Normal	Quiet (fan low)	Extended (fan high)
Dynamic	5,180	4,160	4,027
Presentation	4,473	3,230	3,208
Cinema	3,997	2,635	2,814
sRGB	3,736	1,987	2,598
Blackboard (green chalkboard)	2,843	1,445	2,516

Color Brightness. Because the Pro EX10000 doesn't use a color wheel to sequentially feed different beams of light to the imaging targets, the Pro EX10000's color brightness and white brightness were just about the same.

Zoom Lens Light Loss (from widest to maximum zoom): 7.4%

Brightness Uniformity: 85.9%

Fan Noise. Epson rates the Pro EX10000 noise at 36dB in its sound-proof room using the industry standard technique that averages sound from four sides of the projector. Our casual real-world measurements were taken 36 inches from the projector's exhaust vent in a room with a background noise level of 34.5 dBA. Under these conditions, the Pro EX10000's maximum measured noise of 44.5dBA fell between the LG ProBeam BU60PST's 42.5dBA and the Sony VPLPHZ60's 47.2dBA as measured with the same criteria.

Connections

• HDMI 1.4 (x2)
• VGA-in (x2); second VGA port doubles as VGA in and monitor out
• Composite video
• Stereo RCA audio in
• Stereo 3.5mm audio in (x2)
• Stereo 3.5mm audio out
• USB 2.0 Type-A and -B
• RS-232 serial
• Wired LAN (RJ-45)
• Microphone in

For more detailed specifications and connections, check out our Epson Pro EX10000 projector page.

To buy this projector, use Where to Buy online, or get a price quote by email direct from Projector Central authorized dealers using our E-Z Quote tool.

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