With its shiny white casing and attractive curved design, the HT410 from NEC is a projector that's clearly built for living room use.

It's also one of the cheaper DLP projectors. The HT410 features a native widescreen (16:9) resolution of 854 x 480 pixels and is able to project an image from 30in right up to 200in.

A vast array of connection opportunities are offered on the right side of the projector. Along with the standard VGA-in, you also get S-Video, component and composite video inputs, although DVI input isn’t supported. Thanks to the included composite-to-Scart converter cable, which is accompanied by a plethora of other cables, hooking up a DVD player is no problem at all.

Quick-access buttons, such as volume and video source, are placed on the top of the projector. A rather crude but effective stand can be pulled out at the front of the unit to alter the vertical projection angle, while a rear tilt stand allows you to quickly adjust horizontal positioning.

If you find that the vertical stand can't quite provide a steep enough angle, the lens shift function comes to the rescue. Using a manual dial, it's possible to alter the vertical angle of the lens without having to place a couple of dictionaries underneath the projector. Horizontal lens shift, however, isn't offered.

In terms of image quality, the HT410 performed just about as we expected. It can't match up to more expensive models when it comes to reproducing colours faithfully, and it also struggled to produce a bright display in well-lit conditions. But as a budget projector we were fairly impressed overall.

NEC has included an interesting function that aims to let you project the image at just about any wall, regardless of its colour. The HT410's colour correction then attempts to compensate for the wall's particular hue. Sadly, during testing this actually had little effect on anything but very faintly coloured walls.

However, we were impressed by the quietness of the fan. Despite producing a bright 1,000 lumen display, it still remained impressively quiet, operating at between 26dB and 28dB.

The remote control is small yet well designed. Usual functions such as aspect ratio, picture freeze and keystone correction are all available, while a red backlight can be activated for use in the dark.

If you're a first-time projector buyer but want to keep costs down, the NEC HT410 is definitely a model worth considering. It's attractively designed, produces a decent image and it's incredibly quiet.