Labs

The PH730 won four stars when we reviewed it in Shopper 224. Since then the price has dropped by £646, so we wanted to see how it compares with newer models.

It's the least attractive projector here, and looks as if it belongs more in an office than a home. In fact, it's well equipped for office use. It has a DVI input, VGA output and a USB port, so you can control a slideshow from a computer. It's also the only home projector with speakers, although the 3W of

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power is fine only for presentations, not movies.

There's plenty for home users, too. It's HD ready and has HDMI and component inputs. At 28dB(A), it's quiet enough not to be distracting. At 1,200 ANSI lumens its picture can be seen clearly under normal lighting. Configuring the picture is quite easy, as there are zoom and focus controls, but there's sadly no lens shift.

With a native resolution of 1,280x768, it can display 720p footage natively with thin bars across the top and bottom. It also accepts a 1080i input, downscaling the image to fit. This projector has the lowest contrast ratio in this category of 2,500:1. This didn't hamper performance, though, and the PH730 displayed a high level of detail in all our test clips.

Rainbow effect can be a problem with DLP projectors, but not for the PH730's seven-segment colour wheel. The biggest problem was image noise.

Acer's PH730 is a good all-round projector that you can use at home and at work. Since we last reviewed it, though, it doesn't compare so well with the competition.