ViewSonic PJ359w review

ViewSonic's business offering sits around the middle of this month's price range at £557, and that outlay gets you a fairly middling projector. It's plain to look at, feels a little cheap to hold, and its cooling fan makes one heck of a racket in use - but rest assured, there's still plenty to like about the PJ359w.

Its 63in image at 2m is close to the largest of the group, and any angle adjustments were swiftly handled by the auto-keystone correction facility. It's one of just two widescreen projectors this month, so video clips looked particularly good in our tests.

The colours were a little luminous and oversaturated - as with most of the TFT-based models here - but we managed to tweak that down a bit using the responsive remote and menu, and overall the resulting image quality was decent enough.

The 1W speaker is weak compared to most in the group, but it's better than you might think; don't get any ideas about watching movies, but it should just about fill a small room with presentation audio. Plus, it can do so over the HDMI connection if your input source is more advanced than the usual VGA-equipped laptop.

But while the ViewSonic may be a decent enough choice for infrequent office use, it comes with running costs that mount quickly as usage rises. Its reasonable £557 exc VAT outlay will balloon to more than a grand after 5,000 hours, thanks to a £212 replacement lamp cost every 2,000 hours.

If the image and build quality were better we might be able to stomach that, but it doesn't do enough to persuade us. Thankfully, for busy offices there are several better projectors this month, which will set you back considerably less over time.

Author: David Bayon