Viewsonic Pro8100 review

ViewSonic's Pro8100 is a huge projector with a centre-mounted lens and controls on one side.

Only Sony's HW10 comes close in size and weight, so you'll want to make sure you find a space where it can live permanently. The motorised lens shift, focus and zoom can be adjusted via the remote control, making the Pro8100 well suited to ceiling-mounting.

ViewSonic has included a host of image-processing features that require a careful reading of the manual to interpret. As well as brightness, contrast and colour controls, you'll find black level, Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) processing and ViewSonic's Precision Color System (PCS).

It took us a while to get used to the back-to-front logic employed by ViewSonic in placing low-level menu items, accessed by pressing the right arrow key, to the left of the high-level items. Instead of a standard, hierarchical options list, this is a highly stylised menu system. However, it's good to see features such as a dedicated focus screen, which makes it easier to get a crisp image when focusing the lens.

Considering the Pro8100 will mainly be used in darkened rooms for movies, the 1,000 lumens rating isn't surprising. In our tests, it wasn't noticeably dimmer than Optoma's 2,000-lumen HD800XLV. Image quality out of the box is relatively good, and not dramatically improved by any of the image-processing options. The exception is the black level control; the 'blacker than black' option improves contrast immensely and brings out details in dark areas. Casino Royale looked great, with crisp detail and vibrant colours.

HQV and PCS allow you to tweak colour and detail to an amazing degree, but we found the results looked overly processed, and it was hard to settle on settings that looked great in all scenes of a film.

The Pro8100 isn't a bad 1080p projector, but Mitsubishi's HC5500 has slightly better image quality and costs £237 less.