Acer H7530D review

Acer's H7530D DLP projector is compact, light and looks like a business projector. Don't let the bland white chassis and built-in speaker fool you, though. It has a Full HD 1080p resolution and plenty of movie-friendly features. It's also one of the few projectors we've seen that's light enough to easily put into its supplied carrying case, sling over your shoulder and take to a friend's place for a movie night.

The H7530D is one of the few projectors we've seen lately without a backlit remote control. A handy button on the remote - referred to in the documentation as "Acer Empowering Technology" - can be assigned to open one of three different menus. One opens a colour mode selection menu; a second, more business-like option lets you control an on-screen timer and timed alarm - handy if you want to use the projector to do a time-limited presentation - and the third mode provides quick access to the eco mode, high altitude and shutdown options.

Above the menu and navigation buttons are keys to controls the aspect ratio, cycle through various levels of digital zoom and switch input source. Below is a set of numeric keys that doubles as colour and brightness controls. The bottom banks of buttons let you choose your source input.

The Colour menu makes it easy to tweak your display settings, starting by changing display mode. You can also adjust brightness, contrast, gamma, colour temp, saturation, tint and all the usual fine configuration options. An advanced menu takes you to noise reduction and sharpness settings and allows you to enable dynamic contrast (called dynamic black) and disable brilliant colour. Dynamic contrast looks poor and the changes in picture are obvious to see as the scenes change on the film you're watching. We recommend turning it off.

We got the best results in movie mode, which produces rich but natural looking colours, although highlights can be a bit brash. Standard mode is a bit more muted, while dark cinema is little different to movie. Game mode is very bright and designed to bring the best out of your console.. These are the most useful options and most users should opt for a customised variant of the projector’s movie mode.

In terms of picture quality, the H7530D is pretty good. It suffers from the usual DLP rainbow effect in black and white scenes, but we didn’t see much of this in either our low- or high-contrast colour tests. We noticed some motion blur, though, both on our demanding moving image tests and in our real-word football match test – some motion blur even presented a slight rainbow edge, but it wasn’t as pronounced as that of some other DLP projectors. Typically for a DLP projector, it produced rich blacks and vivid colours in our high-contrast tests, but its gradated shading of dark colours isn’t the most subtle we’ve seen.

This is a lightweight, versatile and reasonably priced DLP projector, but it doesn’t do anything really exciting. The Samsung SP-A600B, although more expensive, is worth the extra cash.