BenQ PB2240 review

The image projected from BenQ's 2,000 ANSI lumens PB2240 is incredibly bright - handy if you find yourself presenting in a sunny room with no blinds. It has a tendency to completely wash out highlights in images, though, and with fairly coarse adjustment steps and four colour modes (Presentation, Vivid, Video and Economy) it may take a while to sort out the best settings.

Once you're familiar with the menu options, you can achieve good colour saturation and good definition between close shades of white. But black isn't particularly pure, and this background light leaking into dark images takes away some shadow detail in pictures and films. This is surprising, since BenQ has used the latest revision of Texas Instruments' DLP technology, which boasts a contrast ratio of 2,000:1. Fortunately, the bright lamp means the PB2240 offers a decent brightness for video.

Like the brightness settings, focusing adjustment is fairly coarse, so it can take a bit of fiddling to get the image just right. We also found some drop-off in focus towards the lower-left corner, which wasn't only visible in test images but also on the Desktop: the Start menu button was slightly blurred when the rest of the image was crisp. On top of this, we noticed ghosting (like a very faint drop shadow), especially on larger fonts - something no other projector suffered from.

Performance may be average, but the BenQ's strength lies in its relatively small size at an affordable price. It measures 238 x 180 x 86mm (WDH), which makes it below average on test, but it still weighs a considerable 1.9kg. With the cables and remote packed into the carry case, the total is 3.3kg. Not the lightest here (the ViewSonic easily wins), but it's still no hardship to carry.

As is common with most of the projectors here, there's some light leakage out of the vents in the casing, but it's directed down onto the table. If there's any source of distraction it would come from the harsh tone of the cooling fan - it was fairly noisy at 45dBA. Switching to economy mode dimmed the brightness, but the fan carried on at the same speed.

A credit card-style remote is included; handy, but its signal is a little weaker than larger remotes. Also in the box are cables for the VGA, S-Video and composite interfaces, as well as RCA audio, mini-jack audio and USB.

Even if you're short of cash, the PB2240 doesn't offer the best value on test because of the focus and ghosting problems and a black that isn't very pure. It's outclassed in this group - in particular by the Optoma, which costs only £23 more but has better quality.