Review: LG HU70LA 4K CineBeam Projector

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For years, real 4K HDR projection has been kept only within expensive “elite” projectors, requiring significant investment for peak performance. The LG HU70LA offers a brilliant, authentic image at a dramatically lower price point, but don’t expect to find corners cut.

4K UHD (3840x2160) is made possible with XPR technology and delivers a full 8.3 million pixel image. 4 Channel LED, a wheel-less LED technology, overcomes defects like discoloration or rainbow effects normally associated with DLP. Zoom functions that bring up to 1.25x magnification and remote focus make setup and adjustment easier by minimizing the need to adjust the location of the projector. Add in LG ThinQ AI and Google Assistant, and you’ve got a projector that works as smart as it looks.

Thanks to the powerful DLP lamp, the HU70LA can be used in any rooms with moderate light control or better. Designed to be ceiling mounted or placed on a shelf or tabletop, this versatile projector can be adapted to a wider variety of situations than virtually any other true 4K HDR projector on the market.

Video Transcript

"Hi, everyone. It's Adam with World Wide Stereo. Today's video, I'm going to go over the LG CineBeam projector, the HU70LA. The LG HU70LA CineBeam projector is a UHD projector so that's 4K, that means it can handle 4K. And something different that I haven't seen is, inside of this, you have some streaming services built-in, like Netflix and Fandango. So, that's a first for a projector that I've ever dealt with.

Another thing that's different is that this LG projector uses an LED as its light source, an LED engine. Most projectors will have a lamp and you'll get 3,000, 4,000 hours. But they claim to get 30,000 hours of lamp life out of this guy because they use that LED engine. So, that's really impressive.

The projector itself, not very heavy. It's got a nice white design here. Another thing, it has a built-in speaker and it also has Bluetooth connectivity so you could actually pair a nice Bluetooth speaker with this. On the bottom, you'll notice you have these adjustable little feet here and you just kind of screw them in or screw them out if you need to level it or raise it or lower it to make it higher.

And there's no real adjustment to zoom in or zoom out as far as making the picture here. You do have this but if you need a bigger picture, you really physically do need to move that projector back and then you have a little manual zoom adjustment right here. So, not on the remote control, but right up top here for you. So, you'll also notice on the bottom here is you have a hole pattern here to put a mount in.

So, if you're going to ceiling mount this, it would hang like this and then you could put your projector mount right here and attach it to the ceiling. Included with the projector is the supplied remote control and on that you will have, you'll see, direct access here to Netflix and they have a Prime video feature right here. And the remote has the common LG theme where you have a little mouse on the screen that you can use and as you move it around that cursor moves on the screen to help you navigate through the menu system.

It does have voice recognition. This has the LG ThinQ IQ system so you can talk to it, ask to search for a movie and it will find it inside of here. It's also a Google Assistant-enabled device so you can pair this with Google Assistant, tell it to turn on that way. But all your other basic commands are right here and it's a nice remote control. So, let's talk about the connectivity that's on this. On the back, you'll find two HDMI inputs, you'll find some USB inputs.

You also have a digital TV tuner built into this thing as well so you can connect an antenna right to it. You can connect this to the internet with a wired connection or wireless. I always recommend a wired connection, but if that's not possible, you can connect this to your WiFi network and that'll unlock the smart TV feature set built into this.

The listed smart features that are built into this were Netflix, Amazon, Google Play Music, you have YouTube, Spotify, and Fandango Now. So, they will say that they do firmware upgrades to this so more might be available in the future but currently, that's what's listed in the specification sheet right now at the time of this video. As far as audio connections on the back or outputs, you'll have a fiber optic output. You have a standard 3.5 millimeter or 1/8-inch headphone jack stereo headphone jack output.

And don't forget, you have Bluetooth built into this so I have a lot of different ways that I can connect this to get sound out of it. You have the built in speakers. I could Bluetooth this to a pair of Bluetooth speakers. Or I could send its output, the fiber optic output back to a receiver to run my surround sound system or add a soundbar to it. And you have that headphone jack on there. So, you can connect that to headphones, obviously, but it can be an output that you would run into a pair of powered speakers or you can use it as a standard analog output as well.

So, a good amount of connectivity with this guy. Now I want to talk a little bit about the technology that's in here. I mentioned that this had the LED engine which is great. I mean, that's the first I've seen in here, 30,000 hours of lamp life expected out of this. That's a lot of movies. LG will also give you a one-year manufacturer's parts and labor warranty. This is a DLP projector, okay?

Now, when DLP first came out, it's actually like a chip and it's about the size of a book of matches. And on that chip are tons of mirrors, in this case, 8.3 million of them because this is a 4K UHD projector and those little mirrors are constantly pivoting and moving and then shine through what used to be a spinning color wheel. And it was great.

It was a very efficient way of making color. It was very, very bright. But every now and again, there was something out there called the rainbow effect that you would see and that happened when you had a very bright source up against a very dark source. And where those seams came together, if you looked carefully for a second, you would just see this flash of RGB, or red, green, and blue. And we called that the rainbow effect. Well, this projector is a DLP projector but they've been able to take out 90%of that rainbow effect.

And this really worked. Instead of using that spinning color wheel, they use a static color filter to send and there's four channels of them that go through. So now, I'm shining through these static four channel RGB color filters and that has really toned down the rainbow effect. As far as its resolution, again, this is a 4K UHD projector so it has 8.3 million pixel capability.

Also does HGR10. The lumens on this projector, they spec it out at 1,500 lumens which is very bright. That's a bright projector. And the contrast ratio they have in the specs says 150,000 to 1. In the specifications, you'll find that they say that you can get either a 60-inch image or all the way up to 140 and in my testing, I actually had this thrown up on about 120-inch screen and I was about 10 feet away or so from the screen.

So, keep that in mind, the further back that you get with a projector, the less brightness that you're going to get out of it. So, I think around 100, 120 is really kind of the sweet spot for this projector but you can get up to 140. I would just really make sure if you're doing that that it's in a completely darkened room. Any ambient light would really affect that. So, 100, 120, I think you're good with this projector. Now I want to tell you a little bit about my personal experience with this projector.

So, I received this projector and I set it up in one of my theater rooms. I was using a Stewart FireHawk screen and I projected on it. It's 135-inch overall screen that I have but that's a two, three, five to one screen so I ended up bringing this down because this aspect ratio handles standard 16 by 9 and 4 by 3 content. So, I was able to get about 120-inch image out of this. Once I set it on my table, I used the leveling feet down here to not only get the pitch that I needed because I was a little bit below my projector but also to level it out so it was perfectly flat and nice and up on the screen there.

The first thing I noticed when I set it up is how quiet it was. I was very surprised by that. And that's something you want to think about with a projector, especially if you're doing like a dedicated room and this isn't going to be, like, a portable product for you. If you're installing that projector above your head, if it's got a fan up there, that's something you want to think about. Is it going to be way too loud? Am I going to, in a quiet scene, just hear the fan above me? So, very, very quiet.

The next thing I noticed was those lumens. This is a very, very bright projector. I was astonished at how bright the screen was. I was able to turn the lights up a little bit and have a decent amount of ambient light on and still have a very usable image. Of course, when I shut it all the way down, I was blown away by how bright it was. I did actually have to calm it down to get a nice picture, you know, out of it. I didn't want it too bright.

You don't want an image too bright that it feels like it's burning your eyes when you're watching it. So, I had to calm it down in a darkened room. But when I had some of the lights up, I brought that brightness up and it was able to have a nice usable image. So, good projector for watching a football game or a big sporting event or you're having people over and you don't want to bring the lights all the way down. You know, you want to have a little bit of ambient light so this had enough horsepower to do that.

I wired this to my internet and I put my Netflix account in it because I wanted to check out the HDR10 to see the high dynamic range out of it. I also wired it to a Blu-ray player and also a standard cable box. So, I started with the cable box and I put a sporting event on, the football game happened to be on and I was watching it. And the motion looked very nice on it. It kind of stayed together. I did see, like, the grass, though, when the camera moved around or the runner was running on the field that started to get a little out of focus but we're dealing with a sub $2,000 projector here so I didn't want to get my hopes up too high.

I've seen lots of very, very expensive and top-performing home theater projectors and that kind of stuff always stays nice and true. But here we're dealing with a projector that's not quite on that level so I wasn't expecting it to look like that. And of course, it didn't. But a very good image, the edge detail was nice, it was just the body content that started to get a little out of focus as things moved.

But again, the colors were nice so I liked the color accuracy on it and the overall brightness was very impressive. As I increased my source, so then I went to Blu-ray which gives me a better source, the blacks on that and the accuracy of that even got better than watching standard cable. So, I was watching a movie and I put on some "Harry Potter" scenes, I watched some "Lord of the Rings" then I went to some animated detail just trying to cover all my basis to see all the different kinds of movies out there, anything from dark movies to bright movies to documentaries that use really interesting lighting.

And again, it held together pretty well. That motion artifact that I was talking about when things moved kind of stayed true. Again, whenever the camera moved, it seemed like if I move real fast my shirt would've gotten just a little out of focus. But the edge detail stayed intact so that was good. The last thing I checked was Netflix and I started streaming some 4K content onto this projector from there.

The resolution is always impressive for 4K. It always looks fantastic. The colors were nice. I could tell the HDR was working because it had scene where you could tell it was brighter and darker and some background areas so the HDR seemed to be working or the high dynamic range seemed to be working very, very well. Again, same motion kind of thing that was happening there, but again, with the price point of this projector, I think it's performing very, very well.

I've seen some others in this price point and it kind of holds its own with those. But overall, the usage for this, there's so many different things you can do with this projector, between the speaker being built in so you really don't need to have an external source if you're just trying to watch something real quick. You have the Bluetooth connectivity. So, I see a lot of applications for this projector.

So, it's a good one. Overall, this projector has tremendous value for what it does, for the price point, it's awesome. The smart TV feature's built right in. It's fantastic. You have decent connectivity on the back. I even hooked up my iPhone directly to this. I have a little lightning to HDMI adapter.

You could take your iPhone and plug it right into the back of this. Take it outside. This is where I really see this projector being an awesome piece for like that outdoor movie night because it's so easy to move around and set up so quickly. The audio connections are great. You can make a quick Bluetooth connection and have a pretty awesome outdoor movie night experience. If you're looking for an inexpensive projector for a basement, for the kids, or for your own home theater, again, very, very quiet so when you mount it on the ceiling, it's not going to be loud.

It has decent brightness or actually great brightness when you have ambient lights up or when you turn it down. It's got nice imagery on the wall there. I would always recommend that you buy a screen though. But overall, there's a lot you can do with this projector. So again, I think it's a great value. This is the LG HU70LA projector. It'll be available online at worldwidestereo.com, or if you happen to be in the area, you can stop by our Ardmore or Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania showrooms.

We have a 60-day return policy, free shipping, and we're authorized dealers for everything that we sell here. If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comment section below or please call or email us at any time. Remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. This is Adam with World Wide Stereo reminding you to listen to music every day. So long."

Also check out our Best Projectors award list.