Mitsubishi XD490U review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 17 Mar 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Lynley Oram

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Mitsubishi's XD490U is rated at a huge 3,000 ANSI lumens, so it can produce a perfectly visible image in even the most brightly lit meeting rooms.

It also has a high contrast ratio of 2,500:1, which is surpassed only by the projectors designed for home cinema use. At 3kg it's not a device you'll want to carry to off-site meetings, but it won't break your back if you're simply moving it around the office.

We were pleased to see a DVI connector at the back of the projector, and we ran our tests using both VGA and DVI. There wasn't much difference between the two, although the digital picture showed better gradation and less banding in our greyscale test. The XD490U produced strong, even colours and nice transitions in the colour wheel tests. It coped well with yellow areas and showed hardly any of the solid colour banding other DLP projectors exhibited.

As with all the DLP projectors here, our black-and-white contrast test showed up some rainbow effects. Unfortunately, this was also just about noticeable when we played our HD film clip. Although this doesn't affect the still image quality, we would expect more from a projector at the higher end of the price range.

The XD490U sailed through our video signal processing tests. It performed particularly well in noise-reduction and sharpness tests.

This is a slick projector that produces good images for presentations and video clips. It isn't ideal for the businessperson on the move, but it could make a nice addition to the boardroom

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