Mitsubishi HC5500 review

Mitsubishi's LCD projector comes in a small but solidly built black case with smooth curves and a business-like design.

It's smaller and lighter than most of the 1080p projectors here, but the case is 352mm deep and may not fit on a shelf. Setup is also tricky, as it has only vertical lens shift, so it'll need to be placed directly in front of the screen. Focus, zoom and lens shift are motorised, which is handy for making small adjustments from your couch, but the zoom has a small range compared to Sanyo's PLV-Z2000.

The menu system is easy to navigate, and is placed in the top-left corner of the screen where it interferes the least, allowing for easier image adjustment. Two user-defined gamma presets allow you to store settings for different types of film. You can also assign presets or user settings to three buttons on the remote.

Image quality out of the box is good, but a bit dark and dull. The lamp is set to low power by default, so disabling this option brightens things up. Increasing brightness and contrast helped as well, while adjusting the lens iris controls brought out more contrast. Colour temperature was too high on the default cinema mode, and a cooler setting made colours more accurate. If you'll be using your projector in a very dark room, you may get away with the economy lamp setting, which Mitsubishi claims will extend the lamp life to 5,000 hours. It will also reduce the noise level to a barely audible 19dB, although we weren't troubled by noise even at the bright setting.

If there's one niggle, it's that the warranty is shorter than with other projectors here, and you'll have to pay for the postage costs if anything goes wrong. However, the lamp is covered for the first year.

The HC5500's image quality was eclipsed only by that of Sony's more expensive HW10 (reviewed on page 120). It requires a bit of tweaking to start with and doesn't come close to the contrast ratio of the HW10 or the DLP projectors here, but at this price it's the best value and it deserves our Best Buy award.