Epson EB-X11 review

The Epson EB-X11 is designed for the education sector, and it’s pretty specialised. It’s amazingly bright, with a 2,600 lumens lamp, and has a 1,024×768 resolution, so it’s more suited to presentations than HD films. It has some advanced features too, such as a USB connection that can send both video and audio to the projector and let you use the projector’s remote control to control your PC’s cursor.

The projector has VGA, composite and S-video inputs, with separate phono plugs for audio. There’s no 3.5mm audio input, however. You can also connect your PC or laptop via the USB Type B port, which prompts you to install a USB Display driver which provides both audio and video, and lets you use the remote control’s mouse features. It’s awkward to control your PC this way, however – we’d much rather use a wireless mouse.

You can also plug USB flash drives or external disks directly into the EB-X11’s USB host port, but it can only display pictures this way – it supports JPEG, BMP, GIF and PNG files. There’s no multimedia player and no support for Microsoft Office files, so unless you convert your presentation into an image slideshow, you’ll need to attach your computer.

It supports both mirror and inverse images, so it can be ceiling mounted or used with a translucent screen in a rear projection configuration. The zoom allows some freedom to choose screen size: at seven feet, we could project an image that measured between 59in and 70in diagonally. There’s a small plastic foot on a ratchet at the front of the EB-X11 for height adjustment.

The projector has automatic vertical keystone correction, for when the projector is too high or too low relative to the screen’s centre line, and a slider behind the lens that lets you adjust horizontal keystone manually. This has a notch at its mid-point so you can reset it easily. It’s worth noting that keystone correction distorts the image, thus reducing clarity, so if at all possible you should position the projector square-on to your screen manually.

The projector’s image quality isn’t great, as the bright lamp makes deep contrast hard to achieve, so images seem either faded or oversaturated. It’s not particularly accurate, but it does produce brilliant primary colours. The boldness of the colours in some way makes up for the lack of contrast, but the black level suffers, so dark areas in images look grey. Presentations are where the EB-X11 shines, and it produces crisp lines, bold bars and clear text.

You can display a Windows desktop larger than 1,024 x 768, but the projector compresses the image so detail is lost. It’s fine for presentations with large text, but no good for small fonts. You can also display widescreen resolutions, but again detail is lost.

The projector’s brightness comes at the expense of contrast, which is especially evident when watching films; during The Dark Knight, we were struck by how bold the colours were, but in its many dark scenes, and even in lit scenes where most people were wearing dark clothes, there was too much detail missing in the dark areas.

The EB-X11 is a good value education or business projector, and its incredibly bright lamp means you’ll be able to show presentations and slideshows in brightly-lit rooms with punchy colours. The lack of contrast means it’s not a great buy if you want a crossover projector to take home and use to watch films at the weekend, but its low lamp cost, easy keystone correction and extra features make it a deserved Budget Buy.