Toshiba TLP S30 > Reviews > Toshiba TLP-S30 A Form Over Function Projector

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Poor
Colour sensitivity	Satisfactory
Resolution	Satisfactory
Ease of Installation	Simple
Value for Money	Poor

Advantages:	Looks Great  -  Very Stylish, Compact & Very Light .
Disadvantages:	Not Bright Enough At All

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

The Toshiba TLP-S30 Projector

This projector is very aesthetically pleasing, it looks very modern and and the face of it looks to be a great projector.

There are several important factors to look at when considering buying a projector and that is the brightness. This projector boasts a 1400 lumen lamp. For those of you who aren't used to projector terminology, lumens are just a unit for the measure of how bright the bulb in a projector is (and lamp is just the correct term for a projector bulb) Now this isn't an amazing brightness, but the Sanyo PLC-SU20 (just as an example) works comfortably at 1200 lumens and around 1500 lumens is really what somebody new to projectors should probably be looking at.

So the brightness of this projector is good then you woul think. Well actually no; On paper the projector should perform very well, but the projector seems to have a brightness of closer to 400 lumens. If your looking for a projector to use in daylight, then this is certainly not the projector for you. To use the projector well you will significantly dim the room and even use a projector screen.

I feel that I must now make the point about projector screens. Frankly I see them as a waste of money. Now I will admit there is a significant increase in picture quality using a projector screen. But providing you have a reasonably smooth wall and a bright projector (1500 lumens+ is good) then you can project straight onto the wall. Now most people at this point ask me "so I just need to paint my wall white and I can project straight onto it". The answer to this is actually no, you don't even have to start repainting your wall. OK if you've got a black wall you may have to, but I have a chocolate brown wall and I can project quite happily into that. So not using a projector screen saves you money, saves you setting up time. Your picture size is also not restricted by the size of projector screen taht you can get/afford. And you don't have to stick to either 4:3 (standard) or 16:9 (widescreen) as you have the whole wall to project onto.

Now because there have been a few negatives I'd like to bring in a few positives about this projector. Well, it is very light at just 2.2kg! And it is very compact, infact a sheer of A4 paper is actually bigger than the projector! So this makes it great for transporting, especially if you are going to be using for office presentations.

Also with this projector you have the flexibility of being able to either desk mount it or ceiling mount it.

The projector claims to be able to produce an image of up to 7.62m (300") in diameter. But to achieve this you have to be more than 10m away from the screen. I can't think of many places where you can get 10 metres away from a screen unless you have a very long and thin room. But even if you can get this far away, I am very doubtful as to whether the picture would even be bright enough to view. As at 4m away in a dimmed room, this projector was struggling to produce a bright image.

Sorry, this review is getting very negative again. So a positive point is that the projector has got a built in speaker. Which isn't the best in the world (99% of projector speakers are pretty poor, the best I have ever found was in the Philips Hopper SV20 which I will review at a later date). But this projector speaker is very useable for office presentations and saves on setting up time as you don't have to start connecting up speakers and there are less cables to worry about.

But unfortunately this leads me onto another negative and that is that this projector only has a single RCA jack (the video input). So audio has to go through a 3.5mm (headphone type) jack. This is a pain because you can't just use a triple RCA cable for connecting up a DVD player for example. But it's not all bad, as the chances are that if you are setting up your own home cinema, then you are probably going to have your own speaker setup and not be using the projector's built in speaker.

The inputs onthis projector are ok, with a VGA (computer) input, RCA video inputs, S-video input and a 3.5mm audio input. But most crucially of all it hasa monitor output. This is a very handy output if you are to be using for office presentations. During an office presentation you will usually be standing in front of a projector screen and having to look at your audience. So if you need to check your progress or read something, you've either got to strain your neck to view the screen. Or you can turn to view it and turn your back to the audience which is very unprofessional. With a monitor output, you can connect from your computer to the projector to your monitor. This means that whatever is on the projector is on the monitor so you can just look at that.

The projector has a good 400:1 contrast ratio. For a budget projector this pretty good, but the projector is let down by it's 800x600 maximum resolution. For most pc users this will mean changing the resolution on your computer which can be hard to readjust to and plays havoc with your desktop icons.

This projector has a nice remote that is very easy to use. And it fits the hand nicely as it is very ergonomical. It is also a good size as it is big enough so that the buttons aren't so close together it's impossible to use. Yet small enough to not be distracting to an audience during a presentation.

Overall though, this is a nice projector. It looks great, it's just unfortunate that it has been let down by its dull lamp. But if you are simply looking for a projector to project the odd movies at home in the evening this may be suitable. Unfortuantely I have to rate it poor, simply because for most environments it is simply unuseable and for the money there are a lot better projector on the market.