Projectors used to be large, cumbersome pieces of metal that sat at the back of a classroom or lecture hall and helped the students to follow the lesson or lecture. Nowadays they have become much more portable and cater to travelling business people and home cinema lovers as much as to educational establishments.

The ViewSonic PJD5112 is a bottom of the range projector that is principally aimed at home cinema lovers, but paradoxically it's far more likely to appeal to the business and education markets. The reason for this is because of scale: what you're essentially getting is a basic package with a bolt-on gadget that is trying to ride the wave of the latest trend.

Size-wise this is a very compact machine, measuring just 280 x 114 x 218mm, and it's light at 2.7kg. Styled in conventional glossy black, it nonetheless produces a very bright image thanks to the 2,700 ANSI lumens produced by the 180 Watt lamp, and the lens has a 1.2x manual optical zoom. It has a native resolution of 800 x 600 pixels (i.e. SVGA) and can do auto image resizing for VGA, XGA and SXGA.

The PJD5112 boasts a 2800:1 Contrast Ratio, can project HD 720p and 1080i at 24fps, 25fps and 30fps and offers both 4:3 and widescreen (16:9) aspect ratios. The throw distance is relatively limited at between 1.2m and 10m, although the display size ranges from 0.68m to 7.62m, which is sufficient for small hall usage. In addition, there's 40 degrees of vertical digital keystone correction to optimise the image and an Eco Mode which will extend the lamp life from 3500 hours to 5000 hours.

Looking around the back of the unit you find three D-sub inputs (one for a monitor), an RS-232, plus S-Video in, composite video in and a USB port for firmware updates and mouse function support. It's what's missing that's more important, i.e., HDMI and DVI-D. The reason why these omissions are so significant is that ViewSonic is primarily promoting this projector as ideal for 3D viewing. In fact NVIDIA has announced that the PJD5112 is compatible with its 3D graphics cards. So why no digital inputs?

Despite the overall brightness levels, which are more than a match for daylight rooms, we found the colours were generally sombre and lacking vividness, though this could partially be corrected via the BrilliantColor enhancement mode.

Verdict
If you're hunting for a compact sub-£300 projector for your travelling presentations or small-scale tutoring, then the PJD5112 might be ideal, but for home cinema fans, the lack of digital inputs offsets the NVIDIA 3D compatibility.

Company: ViewSonic

Contact: 020 7382 8250

Tags: video graphics array graphic display resolutions hdmi lumen (unit) contrast ratio universal serial bus viewsonic super video graphics array