Mitsubishi Electric XD510U review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 5 Dec 2007

Price when reviewed: £644

Supplier: http://www.247av.com

Reviewed By: Seth Barton

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

The XD510U is the latest addition to Mitsubishi's range of business DLP projectors. It has a rather plain off-white body, with a grey underside.

Although the XD510U has a quieter decibel rating than InFocus's IN36, it sounded louder. In particular, the fan made a loud whirring noise, which is distracting in a quiet room. It blasts out a lot of hot air from the right-hand vent, which would be uncomfortable for anyone sitting next to it. Even with the fan working hard, the projector got exceptionally hot.

The XD510U has two VGA inputs and a VGA output. It accepts component inputs through one of the VGA ports and supports 1080i and 720p HD video, but with no digital connections it is not HDCP compatible.

The XD510U produced a well-focused Windows desktop, but blues were too purple. This could be adjusted a little, but we couldn't get accurate reds and these appeared brownish. The DLP rainbow effect was pronounced and we noticed it even when viewing still images. This can be very distracting, not to mention annoying, when doing a presentation.

Colour problems made watching our progressive-scan DVD less than pleasurable, as did the lack of anti-aliasing. Watching HD material wasn't much fun, as the projector failed to display detail as well as other projectors. The projector's menu has a noise reduction setting, but this didn't seem to make any difference.

The XD501U is fairly inexpensive and has low lamp running costs at 6p per hour, but its colour accuracy and pronounced rainbow effect are disappointing. It is outperformed by cheaper office models.

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