Viewsonic PLED-W200 review

1 of 5

Gallery

Verdict:

A hugely versatile portable projector

Review Date: 2 Jul 2012

Price when reviewed: £389

Buy it now for: £289
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.projectorpoint.co.uk

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Like the Best Buy-winning Asus P1 Pico Projector, the Viewsonic PLED-W200 is a miniature, lightweight LED DLP projector designed to be taken with you.

The PLED-W200 is particularly versatile, as it can receive video from a PC over VGA or USB, has composite and component video connections and can display video, photo and office document files from an SD card.

It's a tiny projector, which is slightly smaller than a stack of three CDs and weighs just 400g. You'll need to carry the laptop-style power supply with you, though, as there's no battery. Rather than a normal bulb, the projector uses LEDs as a light source. This means that it uses just 35W when active, and has the added benefit of 20,000 hours of lamp life; enough to have the projector switched on for eight hours a day for seven years.

The projector has a proprietary video input, which goes to a breakout cable with a VGA plug, a composite video input and a 3.5mm audio input for the projector's twin 2W speakers. You can also plug the projector into component video connections, but you'll need a component to VGA adaptor and a male-to-female VGA adaptor to do so.

The projector can display up to 1,280x800 pixels at its native resolution, and with a short throw ratio of 1.16:1 you can create a 40in screen at just a metre away from your projection surface. The projector isn't bright enough to cope well with office lighting; you can read text and use Windows, but it's a bit of a strain on the eyes. It's absolutely fine in low light, though, which is impressive for such a small unit. Colours are vibrant enough for presentations and photos, and films are definitely watchable. Whites have a slightly grey appearance and reds are slightly orange, but we had few complaints about colour quality during normal use. One problem we had was getting consistent focus across the entire projection surface; either the top of bottom of the display was slightly blurred, no matter how we positioned the projector and with keystone correction enabled or disabled.

Prev Next