NEW DELHI: Anyone who needs to carry a projector around will vouch for the fact that they can weigh you down quite a bit. You could go for one of the lightweight LED projectors (some of which weigh less than a kilo and fit on your palm), but unless you're using them in a darkened room, they're pretty much useless for a presentation with more than two people.
The Epson EB-1775W addresses a specific need. It's designed to be carried around, so it's only about 4cm at its thinnest point, weighs only 1.7kg and yet puts out an impressive 3,000 lumens of brightness — enough to comfortably put out a 60-inch screen in a bright boardroom during daytime — with the lights on! Since it's so slim, you can carry it in a usual laptop bag, along with the laptop.
It's a sleek-looking projector with a built in lens cover, matte-finish plastic body and easy height adjustments. Built in automatic horizontal and vertical keystone correction corrects the image, even if the projector has to be placed at an angle to the screen. You can project a 60-inch image from as less as 4.5 feet away. And to set it apart from the usual business projector, it has built in Wi-Fi too — to connect to the projector wirelessly.
It's based on Epson's 3LCD technology and has a native resolution of 1280 x 800. This resolution, (also called Wide XGA or WXGA) is the same as many commercially available laptops, which is important because it ensures that you see the same image as you do in the laptop without any distortion or cropping. It also has a speaker which can come in handy during presentations.
The contrast ratio is a healthy 2,000:1 which gives detailed black levels. The competing technology for projectors is DLP or Digital Light Processing by Texas Instruments. At a comparable price to the Epson, you can also get a DLP projector with a higher resolution, but you will have to sacrifice the portability and weight advantages.
The Epson even has a variety of inputs like VGA, HDMI and composite — normally not found in business projectors. If you're in the mood for it, you can connect a PC or HD media player using HDMI and watch a movie as well, which the EB1775W handles quite well. It accepts a full HD signal and scales it down to fit the 1280 x 800 resolution.
So, pretty good performance all round, but there are a few drawbacks. In normal brightness mode, the built in fans can really scale up speed, making the projector very loud (a claimed 40db, but it definitely seemed louder than that, distracting the conversation in the room). You'll have to keep it in 'Eco' mode which limits the noise to 30db; a much more manageable level.
Normally, in most projectors, eco mode has the happy side effect of making the expensive lamp last longer, but in this case the lamp life is rated at 4,000 hours for either normal or eco mode. Unfortunately, eco mode also drops the brightness down to 1700 lumens. Still very bright, but nowhere near the blindingly bright 3,000 lumens. In the end, you have to make a choice between a brighter image or low noise.