PLC XU83 review

Sanyo's PLC XU83 is a stylish, nicely designed LCD office projector with a moulded white case and silver trim.

The control buttons are set at an angle on the top of the projector, where it can be difficult to see exactly which button you're pressing.

The projector's onscreen menu is sluggish and the icons used don't clearly signify the function they perform. This meant we either had to constantly refer to the CD manual or select each option to see what it did.

The PLC XU83 has a native resolution of 1,024x768. This is good enough for most office applications and normal for projectors designed for business use. It has a bright 2,000 lumens lamp, so you can use it in a lit room, but it costs 12p per hour to run; Dell's 3400MP, which appears in our 'Also consider...' below right, costs half that.

The PLC XU83 doesn't have to be connected to a PC via cables; you can use a wireless network (via an included USB adaptor that plugs into the projector) instead. You have to install the Network Module software to get it to work. It's difficult to use and doesn't produce a particularly good picture on the projector, though. The sharpness was fine, but it looked like the colour depth had been lowered, producing images with a lot of banding.

Image quality is better when the projector is connected to a computer using the DVI or VGA connectors. However, even after adjustment, we found the colours muted and a little murky over the VGA connection, and transitions were poor in our colour test. Games played smoothly and were sharply detailed. Text is crisp when using all but the smallest fonts.

There are also composite and S-video connections on the rear of the projector, so you can use it to play movies. We connected the PLC XU83 to our DVD player and put it through a number of tests. Image quality in our test DVD movies was sharply detailed with good colours. However, our video signal-processing tests, designed to see how well projectors handle interlaced video, showed some limitations. Images displayed a considerable amount of noise, even with noise reductions switched on.

The XU83 is a nice-looking projector, but its image quality is only average. It is a good choice if you must have an LCD projector and find the rainbow effect of a DLP projector too annoying. Otherwise, Dell's 3400MP is better value, has better picture quality and is much easier to use.