Samsung SP-A600B review

The Samsung A600 is a beautifully designed, Full HD home cinema projector. It uses DLP technology, giving it incredibly good colour reproduction and contrast, and it costs less than £1,000. Its lamp is rated at only 1,000 lumens, however, so it’s only really suitable for use in a darkened room, open the curtains in the day and you'll find the picture too dim to see clearly.

We were impressed by the A600's good looks. The glossy black finish will need constant polishing however, as it shows dust. There are plenty of inputs, including two HDMI sockets, and you can name each one to make selection simpler. It's good to see 24p support for viewing movies at their native frame rate.

The touch-sensitive controls are barely raised from the surface, and almost impossible to see without the lights on. Instead, you'll have to rely on the small remote control. This replicates the touch-sensitive controls, and has a few extra buttons that let you directly adjust the picture mode, keystone and input source. The buttons aren't backlit, but once you've set the picture to your desired settings, you shouldn't need to use it much.

When watching DLP projectors, some viewers see the rainbow effect, a subtle shimmering cascade caused by their spinning colour wheel. However, the A600's colour wheel spins faster than previous models to reduce this. We only noticed it on very stark black and white areas, such as in the introduction scene to Casino Royale. Unless you're very susceptible to it, you’ll have to go out of your way to look for it.

DLP's traditional advantage has been contrast, and the A600 didn't disappoint. As long as you're in a dark room, the picture quality is superb, with plenty of detail in dark areas. However, the 1,000 lumens lamp isn't quite bright enough for our liking; small amounts of ambient light, hugely reduce contrast, making this projector less flexible than many. Colours are impressive, once again with the proviso that the room is dark. By default, colours are very warm, but they can be easily tweaked if you prefer more natural colours.

One of the A600's biggest advantages is its quiet operation. Apart from an initial high-pitched spinning up sound, we didn't notice it at all in normal operation. It does however output a lot of heat from the right side, so be careful where you place it. Lamp costs are reasonable, at 9p per hour. Placement might be an issue, as there's no lens shift, but the 1.3x zoom allows a 56in image to be projected from 7ft away.

While the A600 is keenly priced and has great picture quality in a dark room, it's not bright enough for use with the curtains open, and you'll need to place it carefully as there's no lens shift. However it has minimal rainbow effect and great 1080p image quality out of the box – so at just £894 it wins our Budget Buy award.