Benq HT4550i 4K HDR LED 3200lm Home Theater Projector with Android TV

This is my third BenQ projector and my third troublesome BenQ projector. Picture quality is great but these things are very unreliable. Full of weird quirks. Units not turning on, bad green channels, power issues. My current 4550i is having issues with the main bulb turning off right after start up, after just 7months. Reddit is full of other people experiencing the same issues. The only fix is to send the thing back for service leaving you without your projector. No replacement option was offered. Buyer beware for BenQ. I dont think im going to be purchasing anymore of their products. Especially at this price point. I expect a $3000 unit to work correctly

I have been into home theater and projection for 30 years. so, not my first projector, I have replaced multiple bulbs over the years . I am excited to see the time the image lasts with the new technology .

I originally had the tk800 which was a great projector in itself but I wanted to upgrade due to getting a sonos surround system and needing an eARC HDMI. Immediately after getting it set up and turned on, I was blown away by the available/adjustable screen size and picture quality. Had some issues getting the dolbly signal to pass through (xbox -> ht4550i -> sonos arc) but I called benq and they helped me set it up. I have been thoroughly impressed with benq and plan to stick with em. This is a great choice!

Side note: The specs, last I checked, are wrong on Amazon so just check it out either on benq directly or another site. It’s better than what’s is stated on Amazon.

Out of the box, the picture from this projector is amazing, with accurate color and it’s extremely bright. The only issue with the image is the slightly lackluster black level, which can make very dark scenes look a little washed out. This can be improved with a darker screen but I am still using a white screen in a light controlled room. The black level does not bother me too much though. There is a slight rainbow effect noticeable but only when quickly panning my eyes across the screen. I really only see it when there’s a bright object in an otherwise dark background too.

Feature-wise, I would have liked one more HDMI port for this price. You lose one to the dedicated mini hdmi port the Android tv stick occupies. Android TV is ok but I have been a Roku user for a long time. The lens shift function is great for positioning. However, the knobs have a lot of play and feel very imprecise. That said, I didn’t have any trouble aligning the image to my screen with them. It just feels very cheap and plastic. Aesthetically, it could be a little nicer too. But, I’ve always been a function over form person.

The LED light source should be good for the life of the projector but you do pay a hefty premium for that. When there’s the BenQ 2060 LED 1080p option for just $1000 and 4k bulb models in the 1000-2000 range, it doesn’t seem like the 4550i should cost 2-3 times more just because it doesn’t use a traditional bulb. So, I would knock it a little in the value department.

All in all, I have very happy with my purchase so far!

Have had the BenQ HT4550i for 2 months. It’s a great projector. Very bright and produces an absolutely beautiful picture in both SDR and HDR. I am throwing it to a 142″ Silver Ticket WVS screen and could not be happier with the picture. The colors are very vibrant. There is not even a hint of rainbow effect that anyone in our family can detect. The picture is gorgeous and as many friends have noted “looks just like a 4K TV”.

The one area reviewers have commented on is black levels. I have found the contrast to be pretty good but it isn’t going to be an OLED TV. That’s the trade for having a huge picture. But watching Star Wars is still totally great, for example. I wouldn’t trade it for any regular size TV. So if you’re on the fence about it, I think you’ll end up very pleased with it.

One thing I will also add is that the built in Android stick is just so-so. You’ll definitely want to get a good source like a Roku Ultra or Nvidia Shield to go with this. I have the Shield and it is totally awesome integration. It looks fantastic.

We built a 12×18’ dedicated media room darkened out and the BenQ ht4550i is absolutely stunning on a 142” white screen from silver studio. Bright crystal clear sharpness, we were quite amazed at the quality. Fast mode is auto detected when switching over to the hdmi input with a ps5 and gameplay is excellent ( gran turismo and Elden ring are beautiful. Madden football absolutely playable too… there is only a hint of input lag compared to a gaming monitor but if twitch style competitive arcade is the objective my opinion is this isn’t necessarily best in a media room where movies and story driven games come to life). Only negative to report is that I have not figured out how to use the lan internet port on the projector and the android tv makes use of WiFi only from my limited understanding.

I highly recommend this projector and will be watching BenQ developments for the future ahead!

So here is the story I am waiting for a replacement from Amazon because I believe it was manhandled during shipping and screwed up the fan(s). happens.
Now about this excellent projector. First thing first the black levels are very good on this projector for a projector. You need to run it in smart eco mode and you get great contrast and it’s quiet. I know because I had the epson 5050UB and I ran gravity on both in 4k and 3D and they looked almost the same. Maybe the 5050 had slightly better blacks but the 4550i still has great blacks and better highlights and color. I have an oled E6 so i know black levels and 3D. It is also very good at intermittent black detail. Motion is super smooth on this projector and 3D is very good. Sharpness is a standout and it is noticeably sharper then the epson 5050Ub. It is a bright projector and in bright cinema mode it still looks great with some lights on. Now I must say the epson 5050UB is a great projector but unlike the benq, which uses led rated at 20,000 hours, the epson used a bulb rated at 3000 hours and must be changed. This is a very modern projector and you can see it in design,lighting system, and menu system. It is relatively compact and will Def fit into my blacked out cinema room.

This is an early review, I plan to update it as I spend more time with the projector.

First things first – at 12′ from a 142″ screen, the picture quality is stellar. Crisp 4k with deep, vibrant color and light output that’s strong enough for daytime ambient light viewing. For 3k, that is absolutely what I expected, but my darkest fear in purchasing the HT4550i was that the picture would not be massively better than what I was used to from my older HT2050a. I am happy to see that it exceeded expectations.

Installation was the usual – I had to readjust the mount to fit the differently positioned screws and do the usual fiddling to balance, but the lens shift made it possible to install the projector in fundamentally the same position, with completely orthogonal projection onto the screen with relative ease. I had toyed with the idea of a X3100i instead, but the math on that one just barely worked out, and I am glad to have gone with a solution with more play.

That’s the good, and I want to stress that it’s plenty good.

Following is the list of qualities that turned out not so great so far.

Out of the box, I had to configure auto source searching, HDMI CEC and set the “HDMI Equalizer” setting for the inputs to 32 each (the latter to avoid very lengthy black screens whenever I switch inputs).

Software, settings, remote and configuration are still pretty rough and dire in need of improvement – you can only select between three modes, Cinema, Filmmaker and User, with each requiring bringing up the settings menu and navigating its structure. Cinema is pretty ok for most content, but looks washed out with some content (HDR10+, especially on red), filmmaker is right on the money for everything but enables quite a bit of processing, and I had to resort to a user mode to maybe get what I wanted from the game console – fast, unprocessed output. Even after setting up a user mode, some dialog boxes popped up warning me that there were still active settings preventing fast processing despite me being unable to find those settings in the menu so far. Modes can only be configured while an input signal for the mode is active, and some mode settings appear to persist between different physical inputs. It’s very confusing, and a step back compared to the straightforward menus of the HT2050a.

The remote has a number of buttons hard linked to the streaming dongle. If you do not install it, you’ll get persistent warning dialog boxes about it not being installed. There is a setting to not have the integration, but it is disabled when it’s not installed.

I tried the WCG (wide color gamut) mode once, and found that it is pretty much unusable in my scenario – even though this was at night with no ambient light whatsoever, content became too dark to watch comfortably, and this while the light source overrode my smarter setting and ramped up into normal, which caused the projector to heat up significantly and the fans to become very audible. Worse, ever since I tried WCG once, the projector engages and disengages the filter on every mode switch, with an audible click and a brief pause while the screen flickers to black. I am guessing this is another software flaw, and if I can’t figure out how to stop it, I’ll have to reset the projector to factory defaults to see if it addresses this issue.

Last but not least, and this is something I’ll need to find out if I can work around with a better sound system, there’s a persistent low level warbling whine from the left projector vent that is just loud enough to be hard to ignore. I suspect it’s one of the fans or an interaction between the frequencies two of them are running at. I would have loved airflow directed not to the sides but to the back of the projector, or grills facing upwards to avoid the noise pollution. Maybe I’ll look into 3d printing some directed vents.

The picture quality out of the box is amazing and I loved every bit of it thus until the ERROR messages started appearing from nowhere. With it came the message to reset to factory settings. I did this so many many times and I must say it was quite frustrating. I really wanted to let this work but had no other choice than to send it back.

The projector is good. It gives a sharp image with a lot of detail and the colors are good. Contrast is a little low, similar to other 1080p DLP projectors with DC3, and the operating modes are limited (you can’t activate SmartEco together with the WCG filter, for example). It’s quite bright (adequate for a 130-inch screen), but it’s not out of this world either.
The Android dongle that comes included will be unconfigured after downloading some games from the app store and gives an error message and then no video, and I don’t see a way to reset it to its original factory state, so it is no longer useful.