Product Reviews

Some small companies may find that presentations are part of their everyday life, while other more retiring types may have to stand before their colleagues or clients only once in a while.

If you make presentations rarely, it would be silly to spend £1,500 or more on a projector for those odd occasions. You'd be better off looking at the bottom-end of the market where you can buy a projector for as little as £600, such as Infocus's X2.

Not only is the X2 cheap to buy, it's very cheap to run. The bulb lasts for 3,000 hours in normal mode, rising to 4,000-plus on the low lamp setting of 1,100 lumens. If you ever manage to present

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your way through this huge lifespan, you can buy a replacement bulb for as little as £234, which equates to an astounding 6p an hour at the low lamp setting.

At this setting the projector performs capably in a room with subdued lighting. However, as soon as you turn the projector to its normal setting the fan kicks in and the X2 makes enough noise to distract you entirely from its brighter picture. Even at full power the quoted 1,600 lumens will struggle in a bright room.

Inputs are limited to VGA, S-video and composite. The native output resolution is 800x600, which seems limiting if you've created your presentation at a higher resolution on a monitor. The X2 can compress images up to 1,024x768 but the loss of image clarity is considerable. The projected image is not the biggest we've seen, either, at just 2.3m from our standard distance of 3.5m.

Image quality was never going to be outstanding at this price, and our greyscale and colour wheel tests showed interference that we couldn't clear up, as well as banding and sudden transitions between shades. This rules the X2 out for anything other than presentations, where the minor glitches won't cause as many problems as they would when watching movies.