Cheapish Projector

[Mark Cowgill]

Hi everyone.

Does anyone know of a link where I can look at laptop projectors?,found a few but they seem very expensive.
Any recomendations would be great?

Mark

[PeteM]

Hi everyone.

Does anyone know of a link where I can look at laptop projectors?,found a few but they seem very expensive.
Any recomendations would be great?

Mark

What do YOU mean by expensive? What I think as reasonable may be very different to you. Give us a budget and any other requirements such as how portable it needs to be, min resolution, environment it is going to be used in (how bright in particular)

[GaryC]

Hi everyone.

Does anyone know of a link where I can look at laptop projectors?,found a few but they seem very expensive.
Any recomendations would be great?

Mark

We used www.dabs.com for ours. They do a few at under £300.

Although they don't appear to have them now, we bought an Acer projector. We only use it for lectures and stuff and it has been fine. (It was under £300 a few years ago)

Gary

[Mark Cowgill]

What do YOU mean by expensive? What I think as reasonable may be very different to you. Give us a budget and any other requirements such as how portable it needs to be, min resolution, environment it is going to be used in (how bright in particular)

Anything over 50p:D

Cheapest I have seen is about £250, just seems a lot to project an image on to a wall.

Used in club house,quite portable,and pretty bright

Ta

[JimW]

Anything over 50p:D


I'm a Scot and that seems a little low even to me! so might hazard a guess you are from a county beginning with 'Y':rolleyes: :D



Cheapest I have seen is about £250, just seems a lot to project an image on to a wall.



about 2-3 years ago the 'cheapest' were around £1200
you could buy some absolutely 'massive' models second hand for about £250 and take the risk that the bulb element didn't blow as a replacement was about £400:eek:

As with any 'new' technology after an initial high price the increase in unit sales does seem to find a level and then a clear 'market value' evolve (eg HD/LCD TVs, Gamestations, dive computers). At that point the price doesn't fall and all you get are occasional increases/improvements in specification.

I would suggest £250 is around that level for such a projector and so you are left shopping around for the best spec'?

Jim:cool:

PS my 'first' OHP cost me around £250

[PeteM]

Anything over 50p:D

Cheapest I have seen is about £250, just seems a lot to project an image on to a wall.

Used in club house,quite portable,and pretty bright

Ta

OK your problem is going to be the "pretty bright" as that means the projector is going to need to be very bright or it will be unreadable. You can probably forgo high res as that pushes the cost a lot. I would aim for a minimum of 2,500 lumens, preferably a bit more and 800x600 (SVGA) resolution, if you can push the res to 1024x768 (XGA) it is a worthwhile jump but will cost £100-150 extra.

This seems a good deal (£254) and gets very good reviews from users and reasonable from the magazines
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=502N
http://www.pcmag-mideast.com/ProductReview.aspx?id=1056

If you can dim the lighting you can get away with a bit lower power, this might then fit the bill for £217 it gets reasonable reviews
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=5572
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=2012

However the lower power will give less flexibility, if you can afford to go for higher power it is worth it to give more flexibility.

Neither of these are particularly light weight but neither are huge

Note that I have not used either projector I am just going from general experience and reviews

HTH

Pete