PJ402D

The ViewSonic PJ402D is a small, lightweight projector targeted at the home and small office markets. Designed to function in either a brightly lit office or a home theatre environment, the machine boasts a 2000:1 contrast ratio and a 1600 ANSI lumen brightness rating.

The silver and black DLP projector measures 25 x 20 x 10cm and weighs 2.1kg, making it easily portable, and the packaging includes a small carry bag to help move it from presentation to presentation. The projector body features rounded corners and a recessed lens, so there's nothing to snag on the way in and out of the bag. The small black remote control is obviously geared towards presentations, and features a laser pointer. Three telescopic feet allow for fine adjustment of image position, and there's +/-15° of vertical keystone adjustment to fine-tune any setup.

The PJ402D runs at a native resolution of 800 x 600 pixels (SVGA) in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is ideal for boardroom presentations. Although it will scale content up to 1280 x 1024 pixels (and is HD-ready), any widescreen content must be tweaked to fit the screen, which makes it a little less suited to home theatre, as movies appear letterboxed. It does offer progressive scanning, and a 3:2 pulldown, which made for excellent DVD picture quality. As expected, the paltry 1W internal speaker didn't offer adequate punch for watching movies, but it would suffice for presentations.

The rear panel features USB, audio, VGA, S-Video and composite connectors, while the top offers basic source, menu and keystone adjustments. There's an automatic configuration button on the top panel that quickly selects the source and adjusts the focus. We found it worked well during testing, accurately configuring the projector at a range of 2m from the screen.

All up, the PJ402D offers brilliant colour reproduction and clarity for watching DVD movies, while still being light and portable enough to double as a presentation device. It doesn't feature a 16:9 aspect ratio natively and must scale widescreen DVD content to fit, but it's inexpensive and does a great job of straddling two markets. What's more, it's backed up by a thee-year warranty.