Casio XJ-A135 review

The XJ-A135 is the baby of Casio’s new Green Slim range. It has a resolution of 1,024×768 and a claimed brightness of 2,000 lumens. Considering it’s based on an LED light source, that’s pretty incredible. Other models will be available soon, including widescreen versions with 2,500 or even 3,000 lumens.

To date, we’ve seen several LED-based projectors – the majority being pocketable ‘pico’ projectors. However, with brightnesses of around 10 lumens, their images are viewable only in a completely dark room. Dell and LG launched LED business projectors around a year ago, but these had 50 and 160 lumens respectively. Both weren’t really bright enough, had relatively poor image quality and were still bulky to carry around due to their external power supplies.

Casio’s new Green Slim range may have taken a year longer to appear, but the XJ-A135 has far fewer flaws. It’s A4 sized, so is easy to slip into your laptop bag along with your laptop. It’s not exactly a featherweight at 2.3kg, but at least the power supply is integrated so the only other ancilliary you’ll need to bring with you is a power cable.

There’s no need for a VGA or HDMI cable as the XJ-A135 has built-in WiFi. Once you’ve installed the software from the CD, a small taskbar appears on your desktop and automatically attempts to connect to the projector. It asks for a login code, which is displayed by the projector for a couple of minutes after you switch it on. This also shows the projector’s SSID and IP address in case you need it.

Once connected, your desktop is automatically mirrored and displayed by the projector. The only flaw is that it you have to manually change your screen resolution to 1,024×768 for the best quality; non-native resolutions make text look distinctly fuzzy. Bear in mind, too, that you’ll forgo wireless internet access while your laptop is connected to the projector, so it isn’t much good if you need to show your audience live websites.

The utility – oddly named Wireless Connection 3 – provides two options: high speed or high resolution. The latter is the best choice for PowerPoint presentations or any other demonstration where you want the best quality. High speed is designed for videos, although we never saw smooth playback even with very low-resolution clips. We’d estimate it managed around 15-20fps, but it wasn’t simply jerky motion that made the videos unwatchable, it was the horizontal tearing that meant there were split seconds where half of the previous frame and half of the current frame were visible.