With an ALR screen, there is no doubt that the LS800B can light up a room! Spider-Man Far From Home is depicted with a vividness that is TV like. The image size though was much bigger than our in-house 77in Sony OLED. From a distance of a mere 10 inches, we managed to get a 100in image and that says something about its versatility on any credenza. Of course, like all UST projectors, its optimum performance can only be achieved with an ALR screen and with perfect geometry. This can be achieved pretty easily via an app that lets you connect to the projector wirelessly and corrects the alignment after prompting you to take just two photographs of the screen. It’s really a brilliant system, especially for projector noobs.
Keeping frame interpolation off is the best look for the LS800B and it has controls for Scene Adaptive Gamma and HDR, but colour management is non-existent. You’re best off just leaving it in Cinema mode preset and enjoying the natural skin tones and enhanced contrast. The colour temperature is a chink in its armour though, leaning more towards the greenish or the blueish tinge and quite tricky to get it to behave neutrally. In terms of focus, the Epson made a valiant effort to stay accurate all the up to the corners of our 100in picture and if you ignore some minor keystone-related discrepancies, it does manage to do a good job of it. In a well-lit room, substituting for a TV is where the LS800B shines its brightest though, pun intended. Switch to Vivid mode and it does a stellar job of entertaining with sports, daily soaps and news. The built-in apps do act differently to HDR and support for Dolby Vision lacking, it is a bit inconsistent but stick to 4K content in general and the video processing gets to work and delivers a detailed, punchy picture. The soundbar has a rich and warm tonality to it that really belies its tiny drivers and is testament to Yamaha’s supremacy when it comes to beam steering and DSP.