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The ViewSonic PJ551 may not be much to look at, but it’s a respectably compact product for its type.
The wide angle lens makes the PJ551 extremely well-suited to presentations where space is limited.

Data projectors have a variety of uses, from home cinema to portable business presentations, and getting the right product depends entirely upon your intended use. If you’re involved in giving business presentations, and need something lightweight and compact, but which doesn’t sacrifice features for the sake of portability, then the ViewSonic PJ551 would be a worthy choice.

It’s certainly not the smallest projector on the market, though not everyone has the £2,000 budget that you’ll need for an ultra-portable model like the Infocus LP120, or Compaq’s MP3800. A contributing factor to its size is the three-panel LCD unit used by the PJ551. Because they use larger parts like multiple LCD panels and dichroic mirrors, LCD engines aren’t as compact as the more commonplace DLP (digital light processor) engines from Texas Instruments, but they’re not without their advantages too.

LCD projectors typically have better colour saturation than their DLP counterparts and don’t suffer from the rainbow effect that’s a side effect of a DLP’s colour wheel, which can be particularly visible with large projections in dark rooms. Whether the rainbow effect would even bother your audience depends largely on how sensitive their eyes are, but we find that it can be distracting over long periods. That said, some DLP projectors suffer far less from the rainbow effect than others. LCD projectors don’t suffer from the rainbow effect, though the trade-off here is that they can fall foul of misconvergence – where the red, green and blue channels don’t hit exactly the same place – or stuck pixels, just as you’d find on a faulty LCD monitor. They also struggle to produce the same contrast ratios as a typical DLP, and the gaps in between pixels tend to be more visible (sometimes called the screendoor-, or pixel structure effect).

To be fair, it’s unlikely that anyone’s going to call the PJ551 a bulky product. It’s about the same size and weight as a ream of A4 paper, yet still sports a set of features that are often missing on ultra-portable projectors. It uses a 150W UHB (ultra-high brightness) lamp, which is rated for up to 2,000 hours of use – possibly longer if you use the PJ551’s economy mode. This gives it a peak brightness of 1,500 lumens, which is pretty good for a portable unit, and should be enough to handle projections with low ambient (office) lighting. Contrast ratio is a little less impressive, quoted at 400:1, but this should still be sufficient for presentation purposes. As with all data projectors, the PJ551 has a native resolution, in this case 1,024 by 768 pixels, but it will rescale to 1,280 by 1,024, or lower resolutions as long as you don’t mind the loss of detail caused by resampling.

As a portable product, it’s fair to assume that you’ll typically be using the PJ551 with a standard 15-pin D-SUB connection from your laptop, but this hasn’t stopped ViewSonic from including the necessary ports and filters to handle incoming signals from composite, component and S-Video A/V equipment. These are all found at the rear of the unit, with the mains power on a panel at the side. As there’s no digital signal support, effective automatic signal calibration is vital unless you want to be messing around with manual clock and phase setup. Fortunately, the PJ551 doesn’t disappoint on this score, and produced a signal lock that couldn’t have been improved on by a dedicated DVI connection.

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