Benq MP610 review

BenQ's MP610 is a multipurpose projector that's designed primarily for business use, but it's also suitable for watching the occasional film or football match at home. It's quite cheap for a DLP projector, especially one with 2,000 lumens.

With this level of brightness you can use it under harsh office lighting, although bright daylight will still defeat it. For darker rooms you can use its economy mode, which dims the bulb slightly and increases bulb life from 3,000 hours to 4,000 hours.

The MP610 is very quiet, operating at just 25dB, so it won't interrupt a presentation in a quiet meeting room. Weighing less than 3kg and provided with a carry case, it is very easy to transport.

However, its low price means that BenQ has had to compromise somewhere, and there's a disappointing range of inputs, with D-sub, S-video and composite the only available options. We'd have liked to see a digital input.

The MP610 uses a 0.55" DLP chip, so its native resolution is 800x600, although it can handle higher-resolution inputs and display them well using compression. There's a 16:9 mode, which digitally resizes the picture, so it's not ideal for use as a home movie projector.

BenQ has also used the new golden ratio colour wheel, which uses five colours to increase the colour depth. While our colour wheel test showed good gradation, we found that the Windows desktop looked a little washed out and lacklustre.

We also found the MP610 suffered badly from the rainbow effect. It's particularly noticeable on fast-moving images, such as videos or games, but move your head suddenly during a presentation and you'll see a rainbow flash of colour.

Finally, the MP610 has a 1W speaker, which is handy for presentations with sound, but no good for entertainment use. If you're looking for a cheap projector to carry around for presentations, the MP610 does a reasonable job, but the noticeable rainbow effect and small number of inputs mean it's not very good for anything else.

Author: David Ludlow