BenQ brought two RGB triple-laser home projectors to IFA in Berlin, the W4200 at roughly €5,000 and the TK715i at roughly €1,500, and for most of 3 September the W4200 was being written up across Europe as the first projector in the world to support Dolby Vision 2. By the end of the day the company had taken the edge off that. Classic Dolby Vision is confirmed; Dolby Vision 2, Clubic reported on 4 September, is an objective rather than a guarantee.
The retraction makes more sense once you look at where the claim did and did not appear. BenQ’s own IFA press release runs the W4200, the TK715i and the golf-and-gaming AK900ST together in a single paragraph about AI-driven image processing, multi-stage de-speckle and flexible installation. Dolby is not named once in it. And in the photographs of the stand slides published by Son-Vidéo, the W4200 key-features board carries a gold “World’s First” crown over exactly one of its six cards, and that card is Matter smart-home support. The Dolby card next to it reads simply Dolby Vision, and lists three viewing modes underneath. Whatever was said on stage, the slide behind it was not claiming a Dolby first.
A DLP projector, a new light engine, and a January date
What BenQ is actually shipping is more interesting than the headline it briefly owned. The W4200 moves the company’s home cinema line off LED and onto an RGB triple laser, built around the familiar 0.47-inch DLP chip at 4K UHD. Son-Vidéo, which came out of the show with the fullest specification sheet, lists 3,200 ANSI lumens, a 1.6x zoom covering throw ratios from 0.9:1 to 1.5:1, and lens shift of plus or minus 50 percent vertically and 20 percent horizontally. BenQ’s own slide claims 100 percent of DCI-P3, factory calibrated with a calibration report in the box, and puts a 120-inch image 2.4 metres from the screen. Availability is given as January 2027, although December 2026 has also circulated, and nothing out of Berlin settles which.
The size of that lens shift is the part of the sheet that changes what a room has to look like. Half a screen height of vertical movement is the difference between a projector that needs a specific shelf built for it and one that can go on the shelf already there. It is also what separates this class from the ultra short throws that dominated the rest of the week, where the machine is bolted to a fixed geometry and the installer works around it.
Why the Dolby claim was worth making, and worth withdrawing
Dolby introduced Dolby Vision 2 at IFA a year ago, in September 2025. It is not a metadata revision. The announcement describes a new image engine underneath a feature set Dolby calls Content Intelligence, with bidirectional tone mapping, a motion tool named Authentic Motion, and a split between Dolby Vision 2 and a Max tier for displays with the processing headroom to run all of it. Hisense was named the first television brand to commit, which is why the badge has so far belonged to RGB MiniLED panels rather than to anything that throws light at a wall.
Bidirectional tone mapping is the reason a projector claiming Dolby Vision 2 would have been a real first rather than a badge. Conventional Dolby Vision spends most of its effort mapping content mastered brighter than the display can reach down to what the display can do. A projector is always the dimmest screen in the house: 3,200 ANSI lumens spread over 120 inches is a fraction of what a decent television puts on a 65-inch panel. A system that maps in both directions, and adapts to the room it is sitting in, is aimed squarely at that gap. It is also, by Dolby’s own description, a new engine rather than a firmware switch, which is the likeliest reason BenQ stopped short of promising it on hardware that is at least four months from a shelf.
The cheaper machine is the one that moves the market
Underneath the W4200 sits the TK715i, and on price it is the more consequential of the two. Same 0.47-inch DLP chip, same 3,200 ANSI lumens, same 99 percent DCI-P3 claim, same RGB triple laser source, with a 1.43x zoom, throw ratios of 0.98:1 to 1.4:1 and 4K at 60Hz with a quoted 5ms of latency. The figure attached to it is about €1,500.
RGB triple laser has been a premium fitting for two years. It is what JMGO charges 2,999 dollars to put in a living room, and what the ultra short throws unveiled at the same show are asking between two and six thousand for. A long-throw box with the same class of light engine at fifteen hundred euros is the first real sign of the technology dropping into the range where it competes with single-laser and lamp machines rather than with the rest of the laser shelf. Whether the picture holds up at that price is a question for a meter in a dark room, and neither existed on the show floor.
Speckle is why that question is not rhetorical. Narrow-band laser light interferes with itself on a diffuse surface and produces the faint boiling texture anyone who has watched a cheap laser projector on matte white has seen. BenQ says both models carry multi-stage de-speckle, and it is the one line in the press release specific enough to be tested. It is also the claim a buyer at €1,500 has most reason to care about, because the cheaper the optics, the more the speckle usually shows.
Three projectors, one pattern
The third machine on the stand, the AK900ST, is a short throw rated at 6,000 ANSI lumens with lens shift, HDMI 2.1 and gaming up to 240Hz, sold into the space where golf simulators, consoles and large-room video overlap. It picked up one of the German trade awards handed out during the week.
Put the three together and BenQ’s IFA reads as a light-source transition rather than a product launch. Every model announced runs an RGB laser, and the features being pushed around them — de-speckle, AI contrast, a mechanical iris — are the ones that clean up after the light source rather than the ones that sell it. That is the shape of the whole week. XGIMI and AWOL Vision spent Berlin arguing about irises and contrast ratios, Hisense arrived with eye-comfort certification on machines it had already launched, and almost nobody had a new imaging chip to talk about. The interesting engineering has moved downstream of the laser.
Which is also where the number that decides the W4200 sits. BenQ’s second slide puts a six-blade mechanical iris on the machine and says, in the same sentence, that it “achieves real black – 3,000:1 native contrast.” Native contrast is conventionally what the chip and the optics deliver with nothing modulating the beam, and an iris is a device for modulating the beam. Three companies printed some version of that sentence in Berlin. Until somebody meters one of these machines with the aperture wide open, the Dolby argument is the smaller of the two open questions.
