Epson PowerLite 5520W Business/Education Projector Review

The Epson PowerLite 5520W is a 5,500 lumen, WXGA (1280 x 800) resolution projector for business and education applications. It has 3LCD technology, which means this Epson projects as many color lumens as it does white ones. This allows the PowerLite 5520W to cut through some serious ambient light while maintaining excellent color. The Epson will be at home in K-12 and higher education classroom environments, as well as conference rooms, meeting rooms, and boardrooms.

I’ll start this review of the Epson PowerLite 5520W with a brief overview, followed by the projector’s highlights before moving on to a list of its special features. We will also tour the hardware, discuss picture quality, and talk about performance before summing it all up for you on the last page. By the end of this review, you should know if the Epson PowerLite 5520W  is the right projector for your business or education applications. Let’s get started!

We wish to thank Epson America for sponsoring this year’s Best Classroom Projectors report.  

The Epson PowerLite 5520W claims 5,500 lumens. Epson is known amongst us reviewers at Projector Reviews for beating their brightness claims more often than not, so I expect that this already-wall-melting projector will follow suit. Even still, 5,500 lumens is plenty bright for the kind of ambient light seen in K-12 classrooms and your typical conference room or boardroom – it’s even bright enough to tackle the large image sizes needed for higher education lecture halls. Remember, the larger the image, the more lumens you need!

WXGA resolution is the business and education world’s 720p. That means, it’s business HD, if at the lower end of high definition. For most business and education applications, WXGA is perfectly sharp. In situations where the highest quality image is necessary – such as in engineering or scientific fields – the higher resolution, WUXGA, or 4K capable projectors, will be desired. I generally find 3LCD projectors to have sharper text than competing DLP projectors, though I have to note that this is not always true. I have seen many higher priced DLP projectors that are rather excellent when projecting text. However, as you can see from the image of the various font sizes above, this Epson performs admirably.

Its lamp life is pretty standard – 5,000 hours at full power, up to 10,000 in ECO Mode. Most lamp based projectors fall between 3,000 hours and 8,000 hours, so this projector does pretty well. Running the projector 20 hours a week, 10 months out of the year at full power, you can expect the lamp to last just under 6 years. Not bad! Epson’s lamps are some of the most cost-effective around, and if you’re an educator, you can expect a nice price break through Epson’s Brighter Futures Education Program – more on that on the Special Features Page.

The Epson PowerLite 5520W has advanced connectivity, making it useful for more sophisticated setups, such as what you might see in a higher education lecture hall. We’ll talk more about that on the next page as well, and go deeper into the inputs and connectors when we tour the hardware after that. It is certainly an impressive beast, and though it doesn’t have many features, what it does have makes it great for a variety of business and education applications. For now, let’s take a look at the projector’s highlights before getting into its features and performance.