Mitsubishi Australia XD110U

Mitsubishi's XD110U is a portable projector with a solid set of features - but retailing at around half the price of similar models we have seen. With a 1700 ANSI lumen lamp rating, this unit is capable of projecting ultra bright images with ease. Other impressive traits include its low noise operation and low running costs, although we did notice some display issues which lowered visual acuity.

The XD110U enclosure is made of hard plastic, silver on top and dark grey on the front. Cooling grills are located on both the front and the back of the unit, which help in removing excess heat from the high brightness lamp. The internal lamp is rated for 4000 hours and is one of the longer life lamps available, which helps in keeping operational costs to a minimum. We did not detect quite as much heat from this unit as we have from other projectors, and this helps in maintaining a low noise operation.

The inputs are located on the back of the machine, and they include monitor out, USB, computer in (D-Sub), S-Video in, composite video in, audio in and audio out. The number of inputs indicate that this projector is aimed at computer users looking to project primarily off their desktop/notebook with occasional video use.

The onboard controls are simple, as they should be, and are mimicked by the remote control functions. The primary functions users would want to access include video source selection, auto positioning and power. These are all one-touch buttons, although advanced features can be accessed through the menu button. The extended menu options reveal a few features which are not common to all projectors, but are a welcome addition. Standout options include a reverse projection function and colour temperature configuration.

We found that display quality varied from resolution to resolution. When running in the native resolution of 1024 x 768, we noticed text below 10pts to suffer from aliasing effects, looking blurred and scaled, sometimes beyond legibility. This is often the case on projectors with lower native resolutions, in which the image is scaled up to higher, non-native resolutions. But somewhat surprisingly, 1024 x 768 is advertised as the XD110U's native resolution and so these issue should ideally not occur. We did not experience these problems when viewing at the 800 x 600 resolution, and ordinary text sizes (greater than 10pts) were displayed flawlessly at the native resolution. Colour and contrast levels were acceptable, and the XD110U is capable of displaying a great image, whether running high speed video or gaming.

The big bonuses for buyers of this projector are portability and brightness of the projected image. Users will be able to view projections in a variety of ambient lit conditions, without a washed out or faded image. The high rated contrast ratio of 2000:1 also provided deep dark shades in unlit environments. We have been quite impressed with the range of portable projectors becoming available to consumers lately and Mitsubishi's XD110U is no exception to this, providing bright projection and vivid colour reproduction all from a 2.4kg box.