Dell M900HD review

The petite, Best Buy-winning Optoma ML550 is our favourite portable projector, but the Dell M900HD shows there’s still some merit in being slightly bigger and bulkier when it comes to lightweight office projectors. The M900HD’s LED lamp can produce a very bright 900 ANSI lumens, which is close to double the brightness of the Optoma ML550, and its huge lamp life of 30,000 hours provides great peace of mind. If using it on the move, remember to take its power adapter with you, as there’s no internal battery.

With such a strong lamp, we had no problem at all viewing PowerPoint presentations in our brightly lit test room. We were able to read black-on-white text and white-on-black text perfectly, although we had to strain our eyes slightly to read smaller text thanks to the limited focus ring round the lens.

Elsewhere, its 1,280×800 resolution looked great. Colours were bright, and we could even see a reasonable level of detail in our high contrast test photos. We’d still recommend turning the lights off if you want to present a lot of photos, but you should be able to leave the lights on for simple graphics such as graphs and charts.

The projector has a larger throw ratio than most pico projectors, so you’ll have to position it slightly further away from your projection surface to get a large image. Even so, we could display a diagonal of 71in from 7ft away, so you shouldn’t have a problem using it in most meeting rooms. There’s also a height-adjustable foot at the front of the projector to help you get the best angle.

Picture settings include Presentation, Bright, Movie, sRGB and Custom. While all five can technically be changed and altered to your liking, you’ll automatically be switched over to Custom as soon as you start adjusting the other four. This will erase any previous Custom setting you had, so we’d recommend sticking with Custom and only altering the settings when necessary.

There isn’t a lot of scope for tweaking the picture, though, as Advanced Settings only lets you change the brightness, contrast, colour temperature and white intensity. There are also options to use the 10x digital zoom, change the aspect ratio from its native 16:10 to 16:9 or 4:3, or turn off its auto-keystone correction. Just be aware that you won’t be able to access these settings if you’re projecting files stored on a USB drive, as pressing the menu button only brings you back to its internal multimedia browser.