In June last year I made the big plunge and decided to buy a house with my Fiance. Now with the housing prices being as ridiculous we could only afford a small starter home which had quite a small living room. We decided that rather than have a big telly taking up space we would instead buy a projector. We had seen them in PC World and the prices seemed reasonable and found the BenQ PB6110 quite good value for money (Reasons for this I will get too). Now I use this as a day to day TV but the projectors lamp life has an estimated 2000 hour lifespan. Now this doesn't seem much but I have only done around 1,300 since June 04 and in economy mode it should last at least 3,000 hours. A replacement bulb will cost around £250.
Firstly the projector has a good number of video input options being S-video, composite video and VGA cable. This means that at the same time you can easily have a DVD player and a Sky box attached to the projector at the same time and with a decent PS2 scart lead you can connect this at the same time. The VGA input also makes it possible to rig up a laptop to the projector so you can bore everyone with holiday snaps!
The quality of the picture is very good for the price with a 1500 lumens output and 2000:1 contrast ratio. Now as a brief explanation of what this means lumens are the brightness of the picture, the higher the lumens the less the effect light will have on picture. By this I mean if you have a light on in the room the picture quality will decrease and if there is too much light you will not be able to see the picture. The contrast ratio shows how good the picture is the further it is moved a way from it's screen. For example some projectors with a low contrast ratio will be nowehere near as effective if they are 10m away from the wall/screen as if they are 5m. The picture from a projector with a high ratio should differ too much as you take it back from the screen. Therefore the higher rating of these the better the quality of the picture. Now many projectors at the same price band were offering arounf 1100 lumens and 400:1 contrast ratio which shows how good the value of this projector is.
The distance you have the projector away from the screen/wall will depend on how big the picture shown is. This is why you need to consider the size of your room before buying as if you are planning on having a large distance between the screen and projector you will need a larger contrast ratio. This projector works well to around 15 feet but that is as far as I have been able to test it.
There projector also has 4:3 and 16:9 settings which is good as you can have 4:3 mode for normal TV viewing and 16:9 for films and sports.
There are also a number of different picture quality settings that can be used for different uses. There is economy for saving the lamp life, game mode for computer mode and movie mode for watching films.
Now the downsides are that firstly it doesn't take scart cables which means unless you have a sky (and maybe cable but don't quote me on that) you are going to be unable to get a TV picture to the projector. If will however be compatible with most DVD players as they usually have a composite video connection.
The second negative point is that it has no sound output which means you are going to need to have a seperate speaker system. Now I have a cinema surround sound DVD player so I can run the sky and playstation through the DVD player. Your only other option would to be to make sure your DVD player (non-speaker system) or Sky box has red and white audio outputs and run cables to seperate speaker system which could be your HI-FI.
The final point to note is that the picture quality is good but you will need a room to be darkened during the day to see the picture properly especially if like me you are planning on beaming the picture on to a light coloured wall rather than a screen.
Overall a sound purchase and for the size of screen you get (Mine is around a 50" width) a hell of a lot cheaper than a plasma or LCD although I will purchase the later when I get the money and move the projector to a seperate room solely for movie and game playing purposes.
I bought mine for around £670 with a free x-box so I would expect to pay around £400 -£450 at the present time.
More details
Ease of Use
Very Easy
Compatibility
Good
Quality
Good
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