Viewsonic PLED-W200 review

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.