The 10 best business projectors of 2017
Getting the best business projector for your work can help transform your presentations, and make meetings more engaging and interactive, which means you'll want to invest in a business projector that provides both impressive image quality and dependability.
If you're on the road often, then these projectors need to be portable as well - but that doesn't mean you have to make compromises with connectivity, or with projection size. You'll find that many small projectors these days can still produce large projections - while also coming with a range of ports for hooking your equipment up.
Buying a projector for work means you're looking for different features than if you were buying a projector for entertainment purposes, so super-high resolutions and millions of inputs aren't going to be high on your 'must have' list.
Unfortunately, plenty of offices often cheap out in when buying business projectors, or not doing their research, and investing in headaches for years to come. So now is a good excuse as any to review our favorite options for your office's projector unit.
Sure, we've reviewed some portable projectors, and many in this roundup qualify as portable, but the Philips PicoPix PPX4010 is impressively small. So small, that you wonder what use case demands it be that small, aside from it being able to easily fit into a your briefcase, or even a jacket pocket.
Philips has created a projector so small it could be used to surprise unsuspecting co-workers who were blissfully unaware that a meeting was in their future.
Selling for an affordable price, it features an easy setup and is able to project content only drawing power via USB. Unlike Philips older PicoPix mini projectors (some of which appeared on this very list), the Philips PicoPix PPX4010 has a 100 lumens brighness, which means it doesn't have to be used in pitch black conditions to see, though it's still not as bright as full-size projectors.
If your meetings are never in the same location often, you're going to want a no-nonsense projector that's easy to carry. For that, we can recommend the Epson EB-S04. Weighing in at 2g pounds, and measuring 297 x 234 x 77mm, it also comes with a carry case included, which makes this a great business projector for people often out on the road. It supports connecting via USB, WiFi, VGA, HDMI, or the mobile MHL. Not only is it easy to move around with, it's extremely easy to use, so much so that booting and choosing your input source only took a mere 34 seconds in our testing. This is all with an intensely strong lamp, which maxes out at 3000 lumens.
It is ideal for those who need a simple, portable projector for anything except for streaming video, as we experienced quality issues there, with output being either grainy or stuttering. So it's not the best projector for watching films on, but as a business projector, it's excellent.
If you're looking to present in a bright room, or shopping with no worry about price, ViewSonic's Pro8600, weighing 8.5 pounds and measuring 13.1" x 10.4" x 4.3" (W x D x H), and Pro8520HD, also 8.5 pounds and a very similar 13.1" x 10.4" x 4.8" (W x D x H) are especially relevant. The Pro8600 retails for about $1700 (around £1125, AU$2068) online, and the Pro8520HD can be found online at a bump up to around $1799 (around £1190, AU$2188).
Both machines run very loud and very bright, thanks to the Pro8600's 6000 lumen and the Pro8520HD's 5000 lumen capable lamps. So if you're looking to make presentations to people who drift off when the lights go out, make sure you consider these options. Neither are great with USB, but if you're looking to present video, both have HDMI slots - the Pro8520HD actually offers two, if that's something you would need.
Both projectors render HD color video beautifully, although Pro8520HD arguably over-saturates the colors. While the video on the Pro8520HD is of great quality, you're going to need to have any audio pretty loud, thanks to a whirring fan that hovered around 79 decibels in our testing. While the Pro8600 suffers the same noise pollution - its fan reaches 65 decibels - it does feature a useful ECO mode that can dampen the noise. As you would expect from projectors marketed on their HD quality, these units can get an image large enough for native HD proportions.
- Read our ViewSonic Pro8600 and Pro8520HD reviews
The ML750e by Optoma may not be the smallest projector we're talking about here, but it's a lot more powerful than the pocket-sized PicoPix from Phillips. It weighs in at an ultraportable 380g with a small footprint that makes this easy to carry around. The differences in size between this and the PicoPix are negligible for the power you get in return: a 700 Lumens lamp that lets you present in rooms that aren't completely darkened.
Not only is it port-rich with one MHL-ready HDMI input, a USB 2.0 slot for thumbdrives, a universal I/O slot, and a microSD card slot, but the ML550 handled our 90-inch test screen with impressive results, and peaked at a 60-inch-or-so size. Much like the ViewSonic PLED-W800, though, the ML750e had us grumbling because you need to buy a dongle to achieve WiFi. Which felt as arcane at the time of this projector's release as it does today. And in another moment that felt anachronistic, there is no way to work with the projector via smartphone or tablet.
Usually when you choose a portable business projector you have to make a few sacrifices in order to have such as small device - but that's not true with the Epson EB-S31.
Epson has an excellent reputation with business projectors, and it has brought much of its expertise to the EB-S31. Its 3,500 lumen brightness is much brighter than many other portable projectors, and means you have more flexibility when setting up the EB-S31 in environments where there is still ambient light.
The EB-S31 is small and light enough to carry around with you on business trips - but it also has a very large projection size - up to 300 inches - which makes this an incredibly versatile portable business projector.
The Sony VPL-FHZ55 is designed to be installed once and not moved for a long time. At 26.5 pounds nobody will be volunteering to move it between floors, or even carting it between rooms. It measures 15.3" x 19.8" x 5.8" (W x D x H) and we believe it best positioned on a ceiling, even though that will make it even harder to ever move. With all that size, there is a lot to say about it.
Noteworthy for being the first 3LCD projector - a projection chip technology popularized by Epson and Panasonic - with a lamp-less treatment, thanks to a blue laser light source deployed by Sony. For all that above hype and hubbub, the enormous price should not shock you.
It's seriousness isn't just from a top-out of 4,000 lumens, but the fact that it can go for 20,000 hours, reducing the routine expense of replacing burnt out lamps that projectors generally include.
It is connector heavy, as it should be with that price-tag. The right-hand side is a full set of BNC/component inputs, an RGB D-sub 15-pin slot, DVI-D, monitor output and an HDMI input. On the opposite side is S-video, composite video, various analogue audio ins and outs, an RS-232C control jack (beloved of Crestron control systems, among others), the DC inlet, and wired LAN.
Unfortunately, as we notice all too frequently even with the best reviewed units, there is no built in WiFi for the VPL-FHZ55, though it can be networked. And the last thing we'll note is that the VPL-FHZ55 needs some room. To fill our 80-inch test screen we had to place the VPL-FHZ55 about 11.5 feet away!
- Read our Sony VPL-FHZ55 review
If you're looking for the jack of most-trades option, Epson's EB-X11 is a good place to start. The EB-X11 fits into the middle of the pack, with enough features to make most take it seriously. Measuring just 11.6" x 11.9" x 3.0" (W x D x H) and weighing 5.1 pounds, the EB-X11 is easy to move between conference rooms, or even buildings.
One feature we were particularly keen on is the lens cover that instantly shuts off the lamp and speakers. The lamp inside the EB-X11 is more adaptable than some because of its relatively high brightness rating of 2600 lumens.
Unfortunately it comes with a handful of flaws. The machine only projects to the 4:3 aspect ratio, and when you're showing photos (likely with black bars above and below, thanks to that ratio) you're not going to see the sharpest reproduction thanks to the projector's low resolution.
Unlike other projectors we've talked about in this round-up, the USB slot on the EB-X11 can only handle photos, and the machine has no WiFi options. If all of those red flags aren't enough to dissuade you, and poor audio quality wouldn't either, then still consider the EB-X11.
- Read our Epson EB-X11 review
The Asus ZenBeam E1 is a beautifully designed pocket projector that's small and light enough to carry around with you if you often make presentations on the road.
Despite its small size, it can project images up to 120 inches in size, and it has a built-in 6,000mAh battery that can power the projector for up to 5 hours, which makes it rather flexible, as you don't have to worry about finding a plug socket to power the device. In a rather nice touch, the projector can also double as a power bank for other mobile devices.
The Asus ZenBeam E1 isn't the most powerful portable projector, but its versatility, ease of setup and eye catching design gives it a place on our list of best business projectors.
Although it's less expensive than other ViewSonic models mentioned here, the ViewSonic PLED-W800 still performs well. It earns its price tag thanks to ultra-portability, weighing in at 1.98 pounds and measuring 13.1" x 10.4" x 4.3" (W x D x H).
With a lamp that can reach up to 800 lumens, you can still run a presentation in whatever room you can bring it to, provided you can shade the windows and lower the lighting. It comes with an SD Card slot, a USB slot, an MHL-ready HDMI input (for connecting DVD/Blu-ray players and also smartphones/tablets) and a VGA input for laptops.
Much like other portable projectors we talk about here, just because you can pass video through this unit doesn't mean you should. For it's price, though, making you pay even more for an optional WiFi dongle (ViewSonic recommends its PJ-WPD-200, which brings Miracast and DLNA compatibility) feels like you're getting nickel & dimed.
If presenting Microsoft Office documents is a large part of your practice, and it probably is, the PLED-W800 should stand out thanks to native support for presenting Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files directly from a USB stick or SD card.
- Read our Viewsonic PLED-W800 review
If you really want to wow at presentations, or turn a whole wall into an interactive whiteboard for brainstorming sessions, then the Epson BrightLink 685Wi is definitely worth considering.
It's an interactive projector that allows people to draw, write and modify the items it projects onto a screen. It comes with a range of software to help you create these impressive projections, and can wirelessly connect to a huge range of devices.
The Epson BrightLink 685Wi certainly isn't cheap, but it's a decent investment if you're looking for a business projector that can be used in a large number of innovative ways.
Contributer : Techradar - All the latest technology news http://ift.tt/18UBExa
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