2010 is supposed to be the year that 3D breaks into mainstream home entertainment but most of the PR puff has been focused on expensive TV sets. Acer does a good job of making this currently tiny market a damned sight more interesting with its H5360, a sub-£600 ‘3D Ready’ digital projector.
3D ready? Acer’s H5360
The H5360 is a small-ish (268×192x80mm) and light-ish (2.2kg) DLP projector built into a shiny white casing that will look at home in a modern living room, and pretty smart in a boardroom. Home movie theatre enthusiasts should note that it’s ‘HD Ready’ credentials extend to 720p only, not 1080p: the H5360’s native resolution is 1280×720 pixels. You can use an enhancement mode to mimic 1920×1080 resolution, but interpolating pixels like this never works as well as you wished it would.
The lens can be adjusted for a zoom using a dial lever conveniently located on top of the unit. Focus, however, is adjusted using a notched ring, snugly and inconveniently located around the red-hot lens itself. So many projectors are built like this, but why? After setting up a projector, you only ever set the zoom once, but fiddle with the focus all the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Billed as the first 1080p projector available for under £900, Optoma has taken a no-frills approach to cram maximum HD goodness into its HD20 home cinemaprojector. Compact at 324 x 234 x 97mm, it houses a full HD 1080p DLP device to satisfy film buffs and big screen HD gamers.
Back to basics: Optoma’s HD20
The HD20 comes with a standard set of inputs suitable for a budget home cinemaprojector. A pair of HDMI 1.3 ports is complemented with a standard VGA connector as well as composite and component video. There’s also a standard 12V output for triggering your motorised screen, should you have one.
The lens throw ratio of 1.5 – 1.8 allows for a picture ranging from 0.96m to 7.64m in diagonal at a distance ranging from 1.5m to 12.5m. A replacement lamp will cost you around £180. Brightness output is specified at 1700 ANSI lumens, which actually makes it Optoma’s brightest home entertainment projector.
Optoma’s quoted contrast ratio of 500:1 may appear bafflingly low at first glance. Yet, for many years, projector manufacturers have told downright lies about their performance characteristics. Brightness, quoted in lumens, was often based on theoretical lamp performance unachievable in any real-world situation. Similarly, overblown and rather useless contrast ratio specifications abound. Read the rest of this entry »
Review We’re all used to being able to take videos and movies with us when we go out, whether it’s on a phone or a portable media player. Some of these devices boast pretty decent widescreen displays too, but with the Joybee GP1 mini projector you can carry an 80in widescreen display around in your handbag.
This miniscule device easily hooks up to your laptop or games console, but it also has a built-in media player to play back video and photo slideshows directly from any handy USB storage device.
Billed as being small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, the GP1 is about the same size as a couple of rounds of sandwiches. At only 136mm x 54mm x 120mm and weighing only 0.64kg, this really is a truly portable projector – although it does require mains power to run.
Taking a look at the specs, it’s clear we’re not looking at a high-end projector here. We have a DLP system with a native 858 x 600 pixel resolution in a 4:3 aspect ratio and a brightness rating of just 100 ANSI lumens – that’s an order of magnitude less than what we’re used to from a full-sized model. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Smaller, lighter, cheaper, less power-hungry: that’s the road we want digital projector manufacturers to take. Indeed, LG does its best to satisfy our craving with a highly compact and thoroughly usable short-throw projector with minimal ongoing costs.
The HS102 falls into the ‘ultra portable’ sector of the projector market: the unit is just 155mm wide, 117mm deep and 50mm high, and it weighs about 750g. In fact, it is only marginally bigger than the power brick supplied with the mains cable that accompanies the product. You could stuff the projector and its cable into your shoulder bag along with a notebook and still have space to spare, well, not much.
Due to its size, the HS102 is not designed for big-screen projections and it would struggle even in a boardroom. With a suggested maximum throw distance of 2.2m, it is clearly a projector for use in the home, in a breakout meeting room or in the corner of a classrooom. At an optimum distance of 1.7m, the device projects an image of about 1.5m wide and 1.2m high. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Price competition at the entry level for digital projectors is certainly becoming intense. Inevitably, the cheapest models are just new boxes containing legacy hardware: you get what you pay for. With the CP-RX80, Hitachi pushes gently against the tide with an attractively priced projector that is actually rather good.
Hitachi’s CP-RX80 LCDprojector: all the better for the no-frills styling
Cased in cute white plastic, the CP-RX80 is blessedly plain in appearance, with none of the ugly fins and gills that projector designers love so much. It would be unfair to call this LCDprojector ‘large’ but it seems fairly substantial because the 317mm width is greater than the 288mm depth, although it is just 98mm high. Read the rest of this entry »
