Labs

A projector can be a hugely effective office tool for presentations and sales pitches, and it can even spark students' interest in the classroom, but most share one common weak point: the noise they make.

In many offices, the drone of a fan is simply drowned out by air-conditioning, but occasionally - in the numerous small meeting rooms in most offices, for example - the sound of a 37dBA projector will be intrusive, especially if it's sitting on a desk closeto your audience.

That's where the Acer P1265 comes into its own. For although it isn't the best projector in other respects, it is the quietest, which may be enough to recommend it over some of the otherwise brighter and better-quality machines.

The quoted

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28dBA and 24dBA isn't quite realistic, but in our tests the projector was barely audible in an average office environment - it certainly won't be intrusive, even if you're the one sitting right next to it.

It's a pretty good package elsewhere, too. Black performance was superb in our tests and whites looked white without bleaching out too much. Colours were good as well, but despite the fact that it has a six-segment colour wheel output they didn't look quite as vivid and three-dimensional as the excellent Mitsubishi DLP projector. It also had a softer focus than we'd like.

There are other things to like about this Acer, though. It has a DVI input, where most others in this Labs have D-SUB, and the total cost of ownership after 10,000 hours is lower than any of the other DLP projectors on test this month, thanks to a long-life lamp that only needs to be replaced every 3,000 hours. All that is enough to push the P1265 up into second position in the group overall, but it's beaten by the slightly superior image quality of the ViewSonic.

It's a close-run thing: the Acer's quietness, DVI input and good image quality nearly did enough to gain it an award this month. But it doesn't quite offer the all-round package of the ViewSonic PJ758, and image quality still can't match that of the InFocus IN36.