Viewsonic PLED-W200 review

Like the Best Buy-winning Asus P1 Pico Projector, the Viewsonic PLED-W200 is a miniature, lightweight LED DLP projector designed to be taken with you.

The PLED-W200 is particularly versatile, as it can receive video from a PC over VGA or USB, has composite and component video connections and can display video, photo and office document files from an SD card.

It’s a tiny projector, which is slightly smaller than a stack of three CDs and weighs just 400g. You’ll need to carry the laptop-style power supply with you, though, as there’s no battery. Rather than a normal bulb, the projector uses LEDs as a light source. This means that it uses just 35W when active, and has the added benefit of 20,000 hours of lamp life; enough to have the projector switched on for eight hours a day for seven years.

The projector has a proprietary video input, which goes to a breakout cable with a VGA plug, a composite video input and a 3.5mm audio input for the projector’s twin 2W speakers. You can also plug the projector into component video connections, but you’ll need a component to VGA adaptor and a male-to-female VGA adaptor to do so.

The projector can display up to 1,280×800 pixels at its native resolution, and with a short throw ratio of 1.16:1 you can create a 40in screen at just a metre away from your projection surface. The projector isn’t bright enough to cope well with office lighting; you can read text and use Windows, but it’s a bit of a strain on the eyes. It’s absolutely fine in low light, though, which is impressive for such a small unit. Colours are vibrant enough for presentations and photos, and films are definitely watchable. Whites have a slightly grey appearance and reds are slightly orange, but we had few complaints about colour quality during normal use. One problem we had was getting consistent focus across the entire projection surface; either the top of bottom of the display was slightly blurred, no matter how we positioned the projector and with keystone correction enabled or disabled.

We found the SD card functions particularly useful. You control the simple onscreen file browser with the remote control, and can browse through an SD card’s videos, photos and office documents. The unit could play all our test videos smoothly; we had no problems with MKV, XviD, AVI, MOV, WMV, H.264 and MPEG4 videos, but the projector only supports 16:9, 16:10, 4:3 and aspect ratios when playing from SD, so films are slightly stretched no matter which you select. Films were fine when played from a Windows laptop, however. The built-in speakers are very tinny but at least louder than most laptops’. We enjoyed playing back photo slideshows from the SD card, but the experience was spoilt slightly by the loading animation popping up in the middle of each photo as you swap between them.

The office file viewer works well. It was fine displaying PDFs and all Office and Office 2007 (docx, xlsx and so on) files, and you can use the remote control’s direction keys to move between pages, zoom in on text and scroll around documents. The SD card functions mean you can be reasonably confident of taking the projector with you without a PC to give a presentation.

The final connection option is to plug the projector into your PC over USB. The PLED-W200 has a Mini USB port for this purpose, but you’ll need to supply your own Mini USB cable. When you plug the projector into your PC, you’re prompted to install the USB driver from the projector’s internal storage, and the PLED-W200 will then act as an external display. Resolutions are limited over USB to 1,024×768, 1,280×720 and 1,280×768, but this is still fine for presentations. The only problem with using a PC on the projector over USB was that pointer movement wasn’t quite as responsive as when using a normal external display and films, while mainly smooth, exhibited slight tearing as the USB bus struggled to supply enough bandwidth.

The Viewsonic PLED-W200 is a superb portable projector. It has a huge range of connections and can play back a range of files from an SD card so you don’t even have to bring a PC with you. Image quality is also reasonable for such a small projector, and the LED light source will last the life of the unit, so you don’t have to worry about running costs. Its versatility makes it our new favourite pocket projector, and a Best Buy.