Product Reviews

It might look like a robot vacuum cleaner, but Optoma's MovieTime is all you need to watch movies. The white casing contains a DVD player, a DLP projector and speakers.

It's not without its problems, though. First, the projector is designed to be placed on a table and project upwards towards a screen. If you place it any higher, it just projects on to the ceiling and the screen controls don't provide enough adjustment to move it down to a wall.

Next, the DLP projector has a resolution of only 854x480 (NTSC). All other inputs, including PAL (1,024x576), are downscaled to fit the projector's resolution.

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For PAL DVDs you can't really tell the difference, but using the D-sub input with a PC produces very poor results, so there's little point in using the projector for this purpose. Optoma says the MovieTime is HD compatible, but as HD images are downscaled to match the projector's resolution there's very little point.

Video quality when watching DVDs is pretty good, as the image doesn't have to be scaled. Colours are accurate and the display is sharp, but nothing to get excited about. Unfortunately, the DVD player is difficult to use because of the remote's odd layout. It also doesn't work quite as you'd expect. Skipping a chapter forwards doesn't display the chapter number onscreen, and skipping back a chapter doesn't take you to the start of the current one but jumps you back to the start of the previous chapter.

The two 5W speakers are incredibly bad and have particularly poor bass reproduction. They also seem to amplify annoying high-end noises, such as the motorbike at the start of Spider-Man 2.

What seems a fairly good idea is let down by poor implementation. With such a low resolution, the MovieTime is no good for other inputs and we'd suggest steering clear of it.