Casio XJ-A135 review

If you do need to show videos or animations, you have two other options. The first is to use an HDMI or VGA cable (or the bundled composite video cable). The second is to plug a USB flash drive into the XJ-A135’s USB port and use its built-in media player. This could be the best option if you travel around making presentations as it means you don’t need to take your laptop with you.

Casio bundles software to convert PowerPoint presentations and videos, and the built-in media player’s interface makes it easy to navigate to your files, even on a crowded memory stick with lots of sub-folders. Converted PowerPoint files were indistinguishable from the originals although, annoyingly, a sound clip embedded into a slide didn’t play.

Both the PowerPoint and video converter couldn’t be easier to use. You simply drag your files onto them and they convert them immediately – there are no settings to worry about. When converting videos, the software was happy to accept most of our test files including DivX, XviD, MP4 and WMV. It refused to convert MPEG1 and VOB files, and those with Dolby Digital audio, as the codec wasn’t installed on our test laptop. The resulting videos played smoothly, but the default quality (640×480) looked a bit blocky at large screen sizes. The ‘widescreen’ preset produced better quality.

Controlling the projector is easy with the well-designed remote control. We like the powered zoom and focus controls, plus the 2x zoom range which allows you to project a 75in image from just seven feet away. We’re not so keen on the membrane buttons on the projector itself; these are hard to locate by touch alone, making it more tedious to navigate the menus.

There are plenty of options to tweak if you so desire. By default, the XJ-A135 is in Eco1 mode, which is the best compromise between brightness and noise. Turn Eco mode off and the fan becomes so loud you’ll have to shout to make yourself heard above the racket. Oddly, when Eco mode is ‘off’, the colour presets disappear, leaving you with just brightness, contrast and colour balance to adjust. Of the four colour presets – Standard, Graphics, Theatre and Blackboard – we found Graphics and Theatre offered the best colour accuracy.

Still, colours were never quite perfect. This could be down to the unusual arrangement that red, green and blue light is produced by the XJ-A135. Red light comes from a high-power LED, blue from a blue laser and, finally, green light (the hardest to produce at high intensities using semiconductors) is produced by converting blue light (using a phosphor) from a laser.