A cheaper 75-inch TV or a projector? BenQ's MD on why your next big screen won't be a TV

For most Indian homes the maths looks settled before you walk into the showroom. A 75-inch 4K QLED television now costs less than a premium laser projector, switches on in a lit room without anyone touching the curtains, and never asks you to think about throw distance. The market agrees with that instinct.

Shipments of 55-inch-and-above televisions jumped about 43 percent in 2024 by IDC's count and kept climbing through 2025, even as the wider smart TV market stayed flat. The big bright panel is winning the living room right now.

So when I put that to Rajeev Singh, Managing Director of BenQ India and South Asia, at the company's Gurugram office this week, I expected him to concede the trade-off. Instead he told me the opposite was true.

The question that was supposed to corner him

"A TV is a big, bulky device. The moment you buy it, it is fixed to a place," Singh said. Mount a 75-inch panel and it stops being something you move and becomes part of the wall. A projector, he argues, is the opposite kind of object. "Today's projectors are so compact, they are plug-and-play. You can use it anywhere, project on any surface, project on your ceiling, move it room to room. When you go on holiday you can carry it with you."

The unit people picture in their heads, he insists, is the wrong one. The heavy box that needed a blacked-out room and ten minutes of keystone fiddling is gone. "Now they have a lot of AI built in. They sense the surface and size the image automatically. If there is an obstacle, they move the image to a clear area. If the wall is cream or blue, it compensates for that colour." Add a built-in smart system, a battery good for about two hours off the socket, and ultra short throw units that sit almost against the wall, and the old objections fall away.

Underneath the hardware is a point on who is buying, and this is the part that is hard to dismiss. His customer is young, lives in rented or shared accommodation, and does not want anything big anchoring a room they will leave in a year. "They want to be mobile, they are outgoing, they go on holidays. They want stuff they can carry." The numbers back the instinct. India's projector sales have climbed from about 2.75 lakh units in 2020, mostly classroom and office models, to over 4 lakh in 2025, driven not by boardrooms but by living rooms, with tier-2 buyers increasingly skipping the TV upgrade altogether. Then there is the impulse layer, which he clearly enjoys. "A projector starts at ten thousand rupees and you can get it on Blinkit in ten minutes. A TV is not available like that."

The myth about make in India

The moment that turned this from a pitch into a story was Make in India. Every brand reaches for that line now, and the assumption is that it eventually means a cheaper product. Singh refused to pretend so. "As far as projectors are concerned, there is no cost advantage in manufacturing in India. It is about supply-chain control. Projectors are not covered by any PLI scheme, nor is there any duty benefit if you manufacture here." The real constraint, as he sees it, is not the assembly line but everything behind it. "You don't have much backward integration possibility in India now, because the supply chain is very weak. That will take time to develop." When I pushed on the difficulty of training people to assemble projectors rather than phones, he was unbothered, saying the current work is simple enough that the manpower already exists, and that the deeper component ecosystem is what India still has to build.

An MD telling you the buzzword on his own slide will not lower your price is rare. It is also where the consumer story gets messier than either side admits. Televisions above 32 inches had their GST cut from 28 to 18 percent in September 2025, after which several brands slashed prices, while lifestyle projectors by industry accounts still sit at 28 percent. On tax alone, the wind is currently at the television's back.

Where the cheap projector boom can burn you

The same candour runs through how he talks about the budget projectors that popularised the category. "They blatantly over-specify. They will claim ten thousand lumen brightness. That is only possible on a three-chip DLP made for an auditorium. The customer cannot believe what is written." The bigger trap is lifespan. "They use a single LCD panel that is unusable within a year. We sell DLP projectors rated thirty thousand hours, which at three hours a day lasts you ten years."

Warranty is the gap he most wants buyers to notice, and it answers what happens to someone in a tier-2 city when something fails. "All our projectors come with three-year onsite warranty, the laser source covered for twenty to thirty thousand hours. When you buy a TV, how many years do you get? One." His read on behaviour is the honest one: people buy the cheap unit first, enjoy the idea, tire of the reality, and upgrade to a proper DLP projector. The cheap one is the gateway, not the destination.

So, television or projector?

His closing thesis is that the projector's future is at home. "That is going to be the major driver. We ourselves are launching projectors with many new things six months to a year down the line." He has elsewhere forecast the home segment doubling by 2029, and the broader India projector market is tipped to cross 2.1 billion dollars by then.

The line that does not survive the data is his bluntest one. "I don't see anything in TV that can compete with what is happening in projector." That is the claim to treat with most caution, because it is the one that most serves a man who sells projectors. Television makers are pushing Mini LED and QD-OLED, QLED shipments nearly doubled in India in 2025, and in a sunlit room at noon a good panel still wins on raw brightness, something Singh half-conceded when he admitted projector brightness is "not right up there" yet. There is irony in his own argument too: the cheap projectors he warns against are the very things driving the awareness he celebrates.

The projector has not won, because on price, tax and daylight brightness the TV is still ahead. But the question is no longer as one-sided as the price tags suggest. If you value portability, a far bigger image and gentler long viewing over peak brightness, the projector now makes a case it could not two years ago. If you want a screen that just works in a bright room, the TV still has its answer, but projectors unlock way more use cases and flexibility for consumers that TVs still don’t.