Event Coverage

HWM+HardwareZone.com Tech Awards 2017: Editor's Choice - Part 2

By Team HardwareZone - 14 Mar 2017

Best Business Projector

Best Business Projector

Getting a bright projector is important if you’re buying it as a presentation tool. So for this business projector category, we requested for projectors with a maximum brightness of 3,500 lumens. We also narrowed down to those designed for conference room and classroom use, and which are priced no more than S$1,400. While they can either be using 3LCD or DLP tech, they all must have at least a WXGA native resolution (that is, 1,280 x 800 pixels).

 

Nominees:

  • Casio XJ-V110W
  • NEC MC331W
  • Sony VPL-DW240

 

And the winner is...

NEC MC331W

A 3,300 lm LCD projector with 1.2x zoom lens, the NEC MC331W excels with packing many features for its S$979 price tag, including 2 x D-Sub inputs (1 can double for output) and 2 x HDMI. It has a 16W speaker, loudest of the bunch, and USB ports for USB image viewer and PC control. It’s also the only one with built-in Ethernet (wireless requires a dongle).

Image quality-wise, it’s slightly behind the Sony VPL-DW240, but that's only in movies. Its data-image quality is on a par with Sony's projector. And because it uses LCD tech, it doesn’t suffer from rainbow effects like the Casio XJ-V110W. Lamp life is up to 10,000 hours using Eco mode, but under normal use, it’s about 4,000 to 6,000 hours.

To sum up, the NEC MC331W is an all-rounded data projector that will play nice in most mid-size meeting room and classroom settings. The high light output makes it suitable for daytime use, its data-image quality is good, and in typical NEC fashion, it more often not will pack more features than similarly-priced models from other brands.

(Additional note: If longevity is all you care about, the Casio XJ-V110W will appeal to you, as its hybrid LED/laser light source has a 20,000-hour lifespan. However, it's a tad short on other features: it has no USB Host function, no built-in speaker, and no wired or wireless networking support.)

Scoring Breakdown
Criteria/Model Casio XJ-V110W NEC MC331W Sony VPL-DW240
Performance 7.5 8.0 8.0
Design 7.5 7.5 7.5
Features 7.5 8.5 8.0
User-Friendliness 8.0 8.0 8.0
Value 8.0 8.5 8.0
Overall 7.5 8.5 8.0
Price S$1,399 S$979 S$1,160

For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed at the References section at the end.

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