Canon XEED WUX450 review

The Canon XEED WUX450 is a high-end installation projector that’s intended to be installed permanently in your home or office. It comes with one of the brightest bulbs we've seen, as well as exceptional performance and a great range of adjustments to allow it to integrate seamlessly into any setup.

The WUX450 is a large projector, and although it has adjustable feet, which means you can sit it on a table or desk, you'll need a fairly big surface on which to place it permanently. For this reason we imagine most users will want to hang it from a ceiling. If you do want to use the device as a mobile projector then there’s a good array of adjustment options, including vertical and horizontal lens shift, 1.8x zoom and keystoning for when the projector or screen is at a slight angle.

There’s a good array of inputs, too. DVI, HDMI and VGA connections are all present, and you can display two inputs simultaneously. The two sources are displayed onscreen in identically sized boxes, so you can, for instance, display a feed from a video conference at the same time as a PowerPoint presentation from another source. The WUX450 also has an Ethernet port which allows the projector to be controlled remotely over an internal network.

The 5-watt mono speaker built into the WUX450 is fairly loud for a projector, but it lacks bass and audio sounds tinny. The speaker should suffice for basic boardroom use, though, and it easily drowns out fan noise. We’d certainly recommend connecting the printer to an amplifier if you plan on using the projector in your home cinema.

Annoyingly, you can project JPEG files directly from a USB flash drive, but nothing else. That means you’ll need to hook up a computer or another device if you want to play videos, show a presentation or project images in a format other than JPEG. It's a shame that this is the case, but it probably won't affect many users.

Despite this setback, the WUX450 impressed us in most other areas. The 4,500 lumen bulb is incredibly bright, displaying exceptionally vibrant colours. Text and presentations appear incredibly crisp thanks to the 1,920x1,200 WUXGA resolution, and the claimed 2000:1 contrast level allows for a high amount of detail in our test images. As with many other projectors, contrast suffers under interior lighting with some darker areas of our test images appearing completely black. This is to be expected, even from a projector priced at over £3,000.

Happily, there was no hint of convergence when we viewed the projected image from around two metres away, with convergence being a phenomenon where some colours are out of sync and thus cause blurred lines. We were also pleased to see that focus remained consistent across the screen.

You can access a huge amount of image adjustments through the remote control or with the buttons on the side of projector. These include all the basic brightness, contrast, sharpness and gamma settings as well as colour adjustment.

The Advanced Adjustment menu allows users to adjust settings based on lighting conditions, including correction for both tungsten and fluorescent indoor lighting. This makes a real difference to image quality, and we’d highly recommend exploring the options available to ensure the projector is set to your liking.

There are five custom image profiles that can be used in addition to the three presets available. Dynamic, Video and Photo/sRGB are the default options. We found Photo/sRGB the best all-rounder, although Dynamic looked good for fast-paced movies. The default settings can be altered and are also used as the basis of the custom profiles.

Sadly, there are no settings for moving images, with the only enhancement advertised by Canon being the built-in motion blur reduction technology. LCoS projectors tend to suffer from motion blur more than those that use DLP technology, but we didn't notice any blurring on the test videos we watched.

The Canon XEED WUX450 is a brilliant projector that displays bright, crisp and high contrast images very well. Its huge array of settings make it a device to consider for any home or office setup. While it is more expensive than many of the other office projectors we’ve reviewed, this price is justified if you demand excellent image quality.