Having a home cinema setup that does justice to your favourite movies and shows has never been more important, but not everyone has the space, patience or deep pockets for an elaborate AV system – but with the right projector, you don’t need one. With Epson’s EF-12 mini laser Smart projector you can get the big-screen experience for a much lower price per inch than a TV would cost, and still with all the smart features you’d expect. Plus, it comes in a compact and portable package, about the size of a shoebox, that you can easily move around the house making it an ideal alternative to having a TV in every room.
The EF-12 can throw up a display from 30 inches all the way up to a luxurious 150 inches – and its 3LCD, laser technology, 1,000 lumen brightness and 2,500,000:1 contrast ratio gives you Full HD pictures with bold colours to rival the conventional TV experience. It’s bright enough to project onto almost any surface, whether you’re sticking it in the kids’ room and projecting it on the wall or ceiling for a movie night in bed; or if you want to take it into the garden to watch the football outdoors on a warm evening, you can string up a sheet and the EF-12 will give you a big (literally) game worth watching.
And wherever you take it, you get stereo sound from the hi-fi pros at Yamaha, with serious speakers built into the top half of the projector so there’s no worrying about not hearing what’s going on. That’s not the only audio option though – it supports HDMI ARC over one of its two HDMI ports, so you can get it working with a separate soundbar or AV receiver over just a single cable if you prefer.
When it comes to finding something to watch, that’s just as easy as the rest of it. You can connect games consoles, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes and more over HDMI, but the crucial part is that it has Android TV on board. Just connect it to your home Wi-Fi and you can enjoy thousands of movies, shows, and games from Google Play, YouTube and other favourite apps, plus it features built in Google Chromecast.
It also includes Google Assistant for voice control, meaning you can tell it what you want to watch instead of fiddling with a remote, and you can even ask it for information or to control your smart home devices.
All this comes in at around the £1,000 mark, which is especially great value for money when you consider the cost per inch and its warranty of 60 months carry-in or 12,000 hours. And for extra peace of mind, being a laser projector means it has a long lifetime ahead of it with no awkward maintenance needed; under typical use you can expect to enjoy your projector for 10 years.
Best of all, for one lucky reader we’ve even got an Epson EF-12 to give away, along with a one-year subscription to Disney+. There’s no better compact home cinema package than this, so to be in with a chance to win, just enter below!
