Acer PH730 review

Acer's PH730 DLP home cinema projector aims to give you the thrills and spills of the cinema from the comfort of your living room.

Supporting a native resolution of 1,280x768, it's capable of taking 720p HD content; it will accept a 1,080i input, too, downscaling the picture to fit.

Home cinema projectors are notoriously dim, as they're designed to be used in a darkened room, so the 1,200 ANSI lumens brightness was a pleasant surprise. At this level you'll be able to see a picture clearly in a room lit by standard lighting. However, you may be better off shutting the curtains and using the 960 ANSI lumens ECO mode, as this doubles the bulb life to 4,000 hours.

One of the benefits of DLP is that the single chip enables a projector to be much smaller than an LCD model. The PH730 measures just 350x282x19mm and weighs 3.5kg, so it's light enough to carry from room to room, or even take home from work at the weekends.

We've always been a bit wary of single-chip DLP projectors for home cinema use, as the rainbow effect is usually evident. For this projector, though, Acer has used Texas Instruments' new 0.65" 720p DLP chip. As well as producing a higher contrast ratio of 2,500:1 (the old 0.8" chip had a contrast ratio of 2,000:1), the rainbow effect was significantly reduced and didn't get in the way of enjoying a film.

Colours were bright and vivid, and images were sharply detailed. The PH730 produced almost flawless transitions between colours in our colour test. Our greyscale test is particularly tough, and the PH730 showed some noticeable banding in the mid-greys with both digital and analogue connections.

There is no noise-reduction setting in this projector's menu. Compressed video files were noticeably grainier than we've seen on home projectors with noise reduction, as were clips in our video signal processing tests.

Inputs on the rear of the projector include a USB connector for remote control by a computer, HDMI, VGA, component, composite, S-video, serial, audio and a VGA output connector.

If you'll be using it for watching movies, you won't be disappointed with the image quality produced by the PH730. It is also versatile, with a full range of connectors, and it's bright enough for office use as well as at home. However, despite considerable improvements over the previous generation, DLP still isn't as good as LCD for video use. Panasonic's PT-AE900E LCD projector produces much better images, partly due to its dynamic iris and 5,500:1 contrast ratio. It's also quite a bit cheaper.

Author: Lynley Oram