Viewsonic PLED-W200 projector review

Viewsonic's PLED-W200 is a compact portable projector designed for business travellers, striking a compromise between the quality you would expect of a full-sized projector and keeping the size down for carrying in a bag or briefcase.

Announced in April and available now, the PLED-W200 is small enough to sit on the palm of your hand and weighs in at 420g, making it comparable to other mini projectors such as Dell's M110.

Consequently, the PLED-W200 is much heavier than the new breed of pocket-sized pico projectors such as Acer's C20 model or the MicroVision SHOWWX+ HDMI, and is also power-hungry enough to need a mains adapter, limiting its portability somewhat.

To set against that, Viewsonic's projector produces much better image quality, thanks to its use of an LED light source and TI's Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology for creating the image, whereas the battery-powered pico projectors can only produce relatively low resolution, rather feeble images.

The PLED-W200 projector is fairly compact at 130x126x32mm, making it slightly smaller in size than a DVD carry case. It comes with its own case to protect it while traveling, but this has no room for the projector's mains adapter and connector cables, for which Viewsonic supplies a separate bag.

It has a native resolution of 1280x800 pixels, making it suitable for displaying 720p HD video, while Viewsonic claims it can support input resolutions up to 1680x1050.

The image PLED-W200 produces is bright enough to present in a well-lit room, although it obviously works best in a darkened environment.

One neat feature of this projector is that it features automatic keystone correction - it adjusts the image to compensate if the angle of the projector is causing vertical distortion.

Viewsonic has designed the PLED-W200 to connect to either a computer via VGA or USB output, or to display files directly from an SD Card flash storage device, via inputs on the right side of the device.

The projector does not have a standard video input, however, instead featuring a connector that appears to be proprietary and which breaks out into separate connectors for VGA, RCA/phono for composite video and an audio jack at the other end.

While the VGA connector simply plugs into the VGA output from a laptop or desktop, the audio connection requires the user to source their own cable with a jack plug at either end, if they wish to use the projector's built-in 2W speakers.

Likewise, users have to source their own USB cable with a mini USB connector at the projector end if they wish to use this method of producing an image from a computer.