Dell M900HD review

The M900HD has a small but useful range of inputs. It’s a just shame they’re concealed by a cheap pop-off strip of plastic round the back, but here you’ll find an HDMI input, a USB port, an SD card reader and a headphone jack. It’s not quite as wide-ranging as the Optoma ML550, which even has an MHL-compatible HDMI input that lets you project from your phone or tablet, but it should still suit most business users.

Perhaps more useful is the ability to project wirelessly from your laptop using the M900HD’s self-generated Wi-Fi network. You’ll need to follow the onscreen instructions and install the Connection Manager Setup software the first time you use it, but it’s very easy to set up; we were projecting wirelessly in minutes. iOS and Android devices can also connect to the projector’s Wi-Fi network, but you’ll need to download the MobiShow or Wi-Fi Doc apps first. If this wasn’t enough, the projector also supports devices with Intel Wi-Di.

As if that wasn’t enough, you can also transfer files directly to the M900HD’s 2GB of internal storage via the bundled USB cable. Files are automatically sorted into Photos, Videos, Music and an Office Viewer through its Multimedia Browser interface, but it’s very slow to load. It took nearly three minutes to load our test PowerPoint presentation and larger files will slow it down even further, so we wouldn’t recommend relying on this for an important business presentation.

Its file format support was good, although we were disappointed it didn’t recognise XLSX files. Neither could it display PPT files. DOC, DOCX, PPTX and XLS files all worked without a problem, though, and the projector also played most of our video files, including AVI, MP4, MOV, MKV and WMV clips. It recognised our MP3, WMA, WAV and OGG music files and JPG, BMP, PNG and GIF images too.

The M900HD’s single 3W speaker is another welcome addition. The sound quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough for short audio clips and brief video presentations.

The Dell M900HD is a great portable projector, and the ability to project wirelessly via the M900HD’s own Wi-Fi network gives it a huge edge over its rivals. It comes at a big expense, though, as the Best Buy-winning Optoma ML550 is much cheaper and far more portable. If you don’t mind its size and want the option of wireless projecting, then the M900HD could be for you.