Lab

DLP Projectors

So you've burned the midnight oil and it's finally finished: the life-changing presentation that's going to get your message across and win you the business. But style is just as important as substance, and if your plan is to simply crowd everyone round your PowerBook to take a look, you'd better not get too cocky. Good presentations need a good projector to do them justice, and in this issue's Labs, we've rounded up eight of the best and submitted them to our rigorous testing regime to find out which one you should be spending your money on.

You might notice some big names missing from this Labs - Canon and Epson, for example - but there's a reason for this. The two dominant technologies at the heart of today's projectors are LCD and digital light processing (DLP). Each has advantages but, on this occasion, we only wanted to find out how DLP projectors performed. It's the newer of the two technologies, has more to prove, and only recently achieved the kind of performance-versus-price value that makes this type of projector a feasible purchase.

DLP technology is licensed from Texas Instruments, and some companies have chosen not to use it in their products, which accounts for some of the apparent gaps in the list of participants here.

Judging projectors is a complex business. The most important factor, though, is image quality, and it's this above all else that will help one of the models here take our coveted Labs Winner award.

We'll also be taking into account design, features and value for money. Design is about more than just aesthetics: we want a projector whose fan is quiet, and which is easy to set up and simple to use. We like simplicity, but we're always careful not to confuse 'simple' with 'basic'. The wider the range of inputs, display modes and other features a projector has, the more flexible it will be. Value for money is important, too - for example, the bulbs used in projectors are very expensive, so the longer they last the better.

We've closeted ourselves in a small, airless room for days to be able to tell you which projector you should buy. Read on to find out how all eight fared.