The NEC VT440 is excellent value at $6,864, considering the features it offers. It’s ultra-portable, weighing in at 3.9kg — so it won’t prove a costly burden when you hit the road for presentations. It has a stylish metallic appearance but, like the Sony, is designed with the power leads at the front. This frees up a little extra length on the lead but does nothing for the appearance of the projector. Aside from the aesthetics, the unit offers some very practical features that make for high quality displays.
The menu feature of the NEC VT44O is the most extensive of all those reviewed by APC, and brightness, contrast and colour temperature controls allow far greater manipulation of the projected image than the other machines do. Another nifty feature is the size of the remote control. The Sony, Hitachi and Acer projectors all have remotes that are ergonomically designed to fit the hand. These look quite similar to your average TV/video remote. The NEC VT440 remote, however, is no larger than a PC card; it’s full of features, yet small and thin enough to fit into a slot at the rear of the projector.
The digital keystone correction is another welcome feature (surprisingly absent on all other projectors reviewed here, besides the Acer PalmPro 7763P). It corrects wedge-shaped image distortion when the projector is angled upwards at the display surface.
The NEC VT440 was the only projector reviewed with an economy option. You can toggle between
maximum lamp brightness and Eco-Mode, a setting which projects a dimmed image to extend lamp life (for up to 3,000 hours, according to NEC). This is handy, as you may not always need the unit’s 1,100 ANSI lumen brightness.
Aside from RGB, the NEC VT440 offers inputs for both video and S-Video.
In testing the projectors, the NEC VT440 was the clear leader and set the benchmark by which ail others were judged in DisplayMate. The sharpness of images was extremely impressive, making text easy to read. The clarity came as a welcome relief to the APC Labs tester’s weary eyes. In fact, the quality of the images produced was so good that no other projector came close to matching it. The Sony offered the second-sharpest images, but there was a significant difference between the two.
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