Labs

Buy the NEC MultiSync LT180, and your audience is likely to be more interested in it than your presentation. It's a lovely looking machine: the case is slightly pearlescent, and the unusual narrow form factor is certainly eye-catching.

There are number of other nice little touches. It sits on three points - the foot at the front raises and lowers the angle of projection, and the rear foot stretches almost the width of the device and is set like a see-saw, allowing the whole unit to tilt easily to correct for unusual setups. This does mean that pressing the top-mounted buttons can cause the image to wobble a little, but it's generally a design we applaud. The zoom and focus controls for the lens are neat and compact.

There

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is a price to pay for this unusual design, however, and that's the levels of heat and noise the MultiSync LT180 produces. It's one of the worst offenders in this respect, and in a small room both can quickly become oppressive.

The documentation is slight, but setup is reasonably easy. We can't think of a good reason, however, why NEC saw fit to position the enter key off to the side of the four-way arrow button on both the unit itself and the remote control, as we found ourselves having to look from the display to our hands when navigating the OSD. Out of the box, the remote control can't act as a presentation controller, as it must be tethered to the projector and no cable is supplied.

While not quite a match for the excellent audio produced by the model from Mitsubishi, music or film soundtracks pumped through the NEC MultiSync LT180 were very good.

VGA-in and -out ports are easily accessible on the side of the unit, and the usual S-Video and component inputs are joined by a set of RGB Component ports.

Image quality was reasonable, but everything lacked vibrancy. Colours were really muddy and, unless you use it solely in a darkened room, you're liable to be disappointed. We also noticed strong fringing in some of our tests.

Beauty can be skin-deep, after all.