We've covered quite a few home cinema projectors on IT Reviews over the years, but it's easy to forget that projectors were initially designed as business tools. And they're still frequently used as such, particularly by travelling workers, mainly salespeople. So here's one that falls squarely into that category.

You can tell that the Toshiba P75 is designed for business because it's light (1.9kg) and elegantly formed, yet our review unit came in a rather large laptop-size bag. This has two significant plus points. First is that it keeps the projector nicely padded and safe from harm, and second is that you have space to put your own laptop in the spare compartment, assuming it's fairly slim, so you only need to carry one bag when visiting clients.

The projector itself has the necessary cuteness factor, being compact (245 x 183 x 86mm), fairly light and well designed. It has a native resolution of 1024 x 768 (XGA) and a brightness rating of 2,300 ANSI lumens, which is likely to be sufficient for any presentation. In a darkened room we found that it was quite sufficient to set the brightness level to 50 percent, so on full power you could probably present your pitch in a fully-lit room. It's a DLP unit which makes for good consistency across the image, and the manual zoom and focus rings work well.

There are inputs at the rear for S-video, RCA, and VGA D-sub, along with stereo input and output (yes, there's a built-in speaker, but at 1W you're probably best off using your laptop with a set of external speakers if you need decent sound). A remote control is included and this, along with the USB-connected IR receiver, means that you have full control over the mouse pointer while wandering around the room. There's the obligatory built-in laser pointer, too.

Image quality is breathtakingly good, helped by the 2,000:1 contrast ratio and a comprehensive set of on-screen controls. Frankly it's wasted on Powerpoint presentations, especially when you consider that the projector has built-in firmware for de-interlacing video to improve movie playback. Still, there's nothing to prevent you including some video footage in your demo.

Aside from the price, the only thing that might prevent salespeople from taking their work home for an evening's movie watching is the fan noise. It's quoted as 35dB, but seemed louder to us. That's not likely to be a problem in an office, though. Toshiba warrants the projector for three years, although the lamp - a weak point in any projector - has only a 90-day warranty.

Verdict
This is a stylish, compact and capable business projector for people who spend much of their time travelling to various locations. It seems fairly robust and, fan noise aside, there's not much here to complain about.

Company: Toshiba

Contact: 08704 424 424

Tags: rca video graphics array toshiba graphic display resolutions universal serial bus lumen (unit) contrast ratio digital light processing