Group test: Budget projectors

If you want to make yourself more popular over the upcoming festive season, try fixing yourself up with a projector. For nothing is guaranteed to have mates and their children cooing more loudly than being able to watch the usual Christmas blockbuster movies and festive season sports schedule not on a 'mere' TV, but rather plastered across a huge expanse of a wall or screen.

Even if you feel popular enough already, who can deny the thrill of being able to watch your latest DVD or Blu-ray at the sort of screen size usually reserved for the local Odeon?

'Ah, if only we could afford such AV luxury in these hard-pressed times', we hear you cry. But actually, you know, prices in the home projection market really are plummeting right now, with the result that we've been able to round up today three HD Ready projectors all costing less than £700, and one remarkably highly-specified full HD model costing just £1,300.

The question, as always with budget products, is whether all the rabid price-cutting has put paid to your chances of actually getting any quality to go with all your extra change….

Overview Price: £650 More info: BenQ Size: 349(w) x 120(h) x 277(d)mm Weight: 3.9kg Native aspect ratio: 16:9 Claimed max contrast ratio: 5000:1 Claimed max brightness: 1100ANSI Lumens Connections: Analogue RGB D-Sub, HDMI, composite video input, S-Video input, component video input BenQ W500 Despite being a traditionally PC-oriented brand, BenQ has earned a respectable reputation for its dedicated home cinema projectors. So hopes are high that the W500 will deliver the goods despite being comfortably BenQ's cheapest AV projector ever. Perhaps inevitably the W500 rather looks its money, with a slightly plasticky finish around an uninspiringly 'officey' design. It just about covers the essential connections though, thanks to its inclusion of a single HDMI, a component video input and a D-Sub PC port. The HDMI is only a v1.2 affair, meaning it's not compatible with the Deep Color system. But we can live with this minor limitation given the W500's meagre £650 cost. Especially as this figure gets you an HD-Ready native resolution of 1280x720 pixels. A more alarming limitation is the projector's 1.2x optical zoom, which potentially severely restricts the living room dimensions the W500 can work with. Oddly the W500 uses LCD technology, rather than the DLP technology generally preferred by BenQ. And to be honest, BenQ's relative lack of LCD experience is reflected in the W500's performance. Particularly galling is the grey, flat look to dark scenes, as the W500 delivers a distinctly 'yesteryear' black level performance. You can improve this by careful adjustment of the projector's 'IRE' setting, but it never completely goes away. Also, the more you try and reduce the greyness, the more dark parts of the picture start to look hollow. The W500 struggles with its colours, too, as skin tones tend to look too red, and certain greens, blues and reds look forced and unnatural. One final hitch is that we could see chicken wire-like traces of the LCD panel structure over the image, especially during very bright scenes. On the plus side, the W500's standard and high definition pictures look clean, sharp and detailed. The brightness of the image is very high for such a cheap machine too, and it handles motion with impressively little judder and smearing. But the bottom line is that while not wholly without merit, the W500 is comfortably outgunned by a couple of rivals today.

Verdict Plus points Crazily cheap, good sharpness and motion handling, and impressive brightness Minus points The chicken wire effect, very average black levels, some odd colour tones

Overview Price: £700 More info: Epson Size: 260(w) x 183(h) x 330(d)mm Weight: 6.9kg Native aspect ratio: 16:9 Claimed max contrast ratio: N/A Claimed max brightness: 1200ANSI Lumens Connections: HDMI 1.2 input; RS-232, component video input, PC D-Sub, composite video input, S-Video input, RCA for subwoofer, stereo jack for headphones, two RCA audio inputs, digital optical audio output, USB type A input

And very niftily integrated this DVD player is, too, forming as it does a base upon which the whole upper projector section can rotate to potentially assist people with getting their pictures positioned correctly on their screens.

The built-in DVD player inevitably affects the TWD10's connectivity, as alongside the usual HDMI (v1.2) and component video inputs you'll also find subwoofer, headphone and optical digital audio outputs. This latter jack allows you to ship audio from DVDs to an external AV receiver, while the first two audio jacks reveal that the TWD10 has its own built-in audio decoding.

In fact, the TWD10 actually has four onboard 5W speakers. But seriously, will even the most casual viewer be happy to hear sound for a film or game coming from the projector, while the pictures those sounds are supposed to accompany are on a potentially far-distant screen? Even with a mere football match the sound/picture discrepancy just feels weird.

This situation throws into question the whole concept of putting a DVD into a projector. For if you sensibly decide to connect the projector to an AV receiver, you'll likely end up with the same sort of messy long cable run you'd have had if you'd got a standard projector connected to your DVD or Blu-ray player.

As well as its dodgy premise, the TWD10 is crushingly off the pace when it comes to black level response, painting dark scenes with a really distracting grey wash over them. Its colours don't look right either, with orangey skin tones and a generally washed out palette.

The TWD10's pictures are also rather soft, even when watching HD, and we spotted the same chicken wire effect at times that we witnessed with the W500.

In a bid to find something positive to say about the TWD10, its DVD playback is quite assured, and pictures can look good if the source material is quite pallid and bright.

But there doesn't really seem much point looking too hard for positives, since we've already seen enough to know that our Christmas lists definitely will not include a TWD10.