Customer Ratings & Reviews

Same projector we had years ago and it lasts for a long time

The Epson Home Cinema 980 is a fantastic home theater projector. Epson has got just the right feature set and image quality to justify the 980's price, without some of the extra features that I often find to be more trouble than they are worth. While I'm not a projector expert by any means, I have used a projector at home for a few years now, and I really love what Epson has brought to the table with this new model. #Unboxing and first impressions# The Epson 980 comes in a standard blue and white Epson box - I'm pretty sure Epson has been using the same packaging design for their projectors and printers for at least a decade, and that's fine with me. The projector arrived well packed with cardboard packing materials. Getting it out of the box and set up was super easy. The two rear feet can be slightly adjusted to level the projector out, while the front "kickstand" foot is super easy to extend or retract thanks to tha lever that releases tension so it glides down. The 980 has 2x HDMI ports, a USB-A port, and a USB B port, and forgoes any analog video inputs. Personally I'm fine with that as it's about time to retire VGA and composite video. If you need to hook up an older game console, there are several cheap dongles available for sale plus many AV receivers have the ability to convert from analog video to HDMI. #Using the Home Cinema 980# I was really impressed with the auto-keystone vertical adjustment that the projector did immediately out of the box. Basically, the 980 assumes you are projecting to a perpendicular vertical surface and uses the angle of the feet to make a pretty significant adjustment to the vertical keystone settings automatically. In my experience, it gets really close to perfect (as long as it's projecting to a surface that's 90 degrees perpendicular to itself. Besides the automatic adjustment, you can manually adjust both vertical and horizontal keystone via buttons on the top of the projector. You also get 1.2x optical zoom and focus that can be adjusted on the lens itself.The action of these rings is very smooth and easy to adjust. Picture quality on the Home Cinema 980 is great. Choosing 3LCD or DLP is a game of tradeoffs - for me DLP is unwatchable due to rainbow effect, so a 3LCD projector like this Epson is the way to go. Fortunately I don't ever need to sit close enough to the screen that the screen door effect might come into play. I found the image of the Home Cinema 980 to be very bright and vivid, even in the Eco mode that brings the fan noise down to a whisper. #Final thoughts# The Epson Home Cinema 980 is a great project to dip your toes into high quality projection without breaking the bank. While it lacks 4K resolution or HDR compatibility, it looks fantastic in SDR mode for gaming or watching movies and TV on a very big screen. It was very easy to set up thanks to the combination of manual and automatic controls. It's so quiet while maintaining decent brightness in Eco mode that it can be used in even the smallest of my home's rooms, which I think is really saying something. I look forward to getting a lot of use out of this projector over the next few years and recommend it wholeheartedly.

This projector will replace my older one for my outdoor movie night setup. Unboxing and getting it going was a breeze and took less than 5 min. My setup is an outdoor inflatable screen that I do a rear projection on so that we don’t have anyone walking in between the projector and the screen and blocking the image. The menu isn’t as intuitive as some other projectors I’ve used, but I found the right settings eventually to be able to get the rear projection to work. Part of the issue is that this is actually a really versatile unit that you can have hang upside down for in home ceiling mounting as well as do both front and rear projection. So while it took me a min. to get the settings right, the more complex menu is for a good reason. My older projector was a cheaper 720 one so this the image was a decent upgrade. The lamp is also pretty bright. For outdoor movies you need to wait until its dark enough and so we usually start just around sundown. When I tested this projector while getting it set up, I realized I could see it pretty well even about an hour before sundown. This is great since then we can start our movies even if its fairly light out so the kids can go to bed earlier. Actually using the monitor worked well. The zoom and focus dials both worked perfectly and didn’t feel overly sensitive or finicky so it was easy to get it set up just right without having to move the whole table around to get the projector the right distance away. This also has two hdmi inputs which may be more important in a home theater setup with more input sources, but for me it wasn’t necessary. Overall I really like this unit and am very happy with the upgrade.

Everything about my purchase was excellent, And Profesional

Excellent value for money and very fast delivery.

If you are looking for an entry priced projector that offers good picture quality and high brightness, and you do not require WiFi or smart TV functionality because you plan to hardwire your video source directly via HDMI, then the Epson Home Cinema 980 is a solid choice. I have used this projector with a 120 inch outdoor screen with great results. The picture was clearly visible during 'golden hour' and visibility got better as the evening progressed. For use indoors with our 100 inch screen, the picture is more than bright enough even with a few room lights on. Adjusting the focus, zoom and keystone on the Home Cinema 980 are easy enough to do that I find myself pulling it out to setup movies nights way more than I used to with our previous laser UST projector, despite that one being a higher end device. Epson does offer a wireless adapter that connects via the USB port, so that may be an option for connecting a computer wirelessly if you have the need, but I do not have any experience with that add on. I would not hesitate to recommend this projector as long as you are ok with it not having built in apps.

Home projectors have come a long way. My experience has always been the picture is washed out and not crisp. It’s been a few years since I tried one so I was interested in this product. First, the size is compact and easy to hang. It went up with very little trouble. Ow for the picture. I don’t like watching TV im a completely dark room and this projector works best with some light in the room. The colors are bright but the little bit of light helps in the color quality. As far as watching sports or movies, both work just fine with no tearing. I did find that gaming was not the best. I would not say to get this for gaming. Oddly there is no HDR support but at this price point it may be common. The projector has wifi 5 which is fine but the current standard is WiFi 6 with WiFi 7 becoming available. Would be nice to have some future proofing. While I this is not a perfect projector, at this price point, it seems to be a strong option. Depending on the environment you want to use it in and what you want to watch, I would recommend this.

Unfortunately I was unable to review this product because I received it broken. One of the mounts screws was cracked so I was unable to mount and use for the big game!

The projector was running on the second floor, and I could still hear the noise clearly from the first floor. This kind of loud noise usually only happens after years of use due to dust buildup and similar issues.

To briefly sum up my thoughts, I think this is quality projector. Overall, it does everything well, is easy to setup and use, is versatile, and provides a great picture, which honestly is most important to me. Build and style, on some level, are about what you would expect. White. A fair amount of plastic. Again, normal, standard projector stuff. That said, it is all put together well, feels solid, and is nicely compact. I don’t really see me moving it around much, but it will be easy, if need be, in the future. Setup, both physically and on the software side, is quite easy and quick. Common adjustment options are there and easy to implement. Both for screen setup and picture quality. There is also some built-in auto help that makes it even more pain free. The entire process of getting content running was faster than I was expecting, and I was impressed with connectivity. It has been some time since I used a projector, but having a USB for content and/or streaming and two HDMI ports is some nice versatility I was not necessarily expecting. I can have some dedicated slots filled and possibly another for an occasional laptop hookup. Additionally, while I am still getting my audio solution figured out, it is nice there is an internal speaker on the unit itself. It at least gives me something in the meantime. Once up and running, everything looked very good. Frankly, better than I was expecting. While I only quickly messed around with some games, they not only looked good but also performed better than I thought they would going in. That said, I was really impressed with how TV and movie content presented. The image was clear, crispy, and vibrant. Colors popped and were quite accurate and the several color modes each showed a nice level of variability. I think the aspects that most stuck out to me were the brightness and the richness of the image quality. All in all, I am very pleased with what I am seeing. Furthermore, in the end, I am pleased with this projector as a whole. Pretty much, full stop. It is built well, comes from a respected name in the space, is very simple to set up as well as use, has solid connectivity, and, again, most importantly to me, outputs great image quality. As always, check your use case, but it does well with all content, and I think for all that you get the value is there.

My previous experience with home projectors is with a very entry-level 480p model. This is Epson is mostly a vast improvement over that experience. I found both resolution and brightness to be excellent for my home. At a 13-foot distance, it's more than bright enough against a white wall, and I didn't feel the need to bother setting up my pop-up screen. Even during mid-morning sun entering through the blinds, the image was impressively bright, and this is true even when using the reduced brightness ECO mode. In a darkened room, as one should expect, this projector does a great job. At the lowest zoom setting from a 13-foot distance, it threw up a roughly 7-foot wide live area. Fan noise in ECO is low enough that it disappeared into the background. The lens is aimed upwards, and the feet don't offer much adjustability, so I found that positioning the projector at any height above five feet became unwieldy, requiring several inches of risers under the rear feet. I eventually plan to place the projector atop a bookshelf in a "ceiling mount" position, which requires setting the projector upside down. In that orientation, the lens will be aiming downward. My only minor complaint is in regards to the sound. There's no low end to speak of, and it's wholly inadequate for anything but presentations with spoken word. For movies or TV shows, it really needs to be paired with an audio system. (I used an audio receiver passing through a Google TV Streamer to the HDMI port.)