Elmo BOXi-T350 review

Elmo may not be a household name in the UK, but this Japanese company has been making business and education projectors since the 1920s. The BOXi-T350 fits into both of these categories, but it’s also one of Elmo’s first mobile DLP projectors that’s also aimed at home users.

Weighing just 500g and measuring 132x143x43mm, it’s almost as small as the Best Buy-winning Optoma ML550, so it won’t take up much room on a shelf or in your bag. The 300 ANSI lumen lamp isn’t as bright as other portable projectors we’ve tested, but its long lamp life of 20,000 hours means you shouldn’t have to replace the BOXi-T350’s LED for a long time. The BOXi-T350 doesn’t have an internal battery, though, so you’ll need to take its power supply with you if you want to use it away from the home or office.

We were a little concerned its lamp wouldn’t be powerful enough to cope with our brightly lit test room, but we could see our test PowerPoint presentation clearly. Black-on-white and white-on-black text was perfectly legible, even with our test room’s lights on, and the BOXi-T350’s manual focus ring made it easy to increase the clarity of the picture. This is a good projector to use if you want to show a presentation to colleagues without plunging the boardroom into cinema-like darkness.

However, we’d recommend extinguishing lights when viewing photos and movies, as it was hard to make out colours and detail in our test photos and movies in our brightly lit lab.

The BOXi-T350’s native 1,280×800 resolution looked sharp, and its short throw range meant we didn’t have to place it very far away from the wall to get a large picture. We managed an 84in diagonal screen size from roughly 2m away, so it’s great for placing on a coffee table or the floor, and there are two small height-adjustable feet on the bottom of the projector to help aim the picture upwards.

You won’t want to sit too close to the BOXi-T350, though, as the projector’s fan is considerably louder than many other portable projectors we’ve tested, producing 47d(B)A with Eco mode switched off. The fan can be irritating if you’re using it for long periods of time in silence or aren’t playing any music to help drown out the noise.

Sadly, the BOXi-T350 has few connection ports, but its HDMI input and 3.5mm audio output should prove useful for many users. Conveniently, an HDMI cable is supplied with BOXi-T350. We’d expect to see a few more connections on a projector at this price, though. The similarly priced Optoma ML550, for instance, has a microSD card slot for easy photo viewing and MHL support so you can project the displays of MHL-compatible phones and tablets to it.

We weren’t particularly impressed with the BOXi-T350’s menu settings, either. Basic interface aside, you can only alter a handful of settings, including brightness, contrast and vertical keystone correction. You can also choose from several picture settings, including Normal, User, Movie, Photo, Game, Graphs and Max, but most of them looked almost identical.

We preferred to use the customisable User mode, but even this was fairly restrictive. In addition to the general brightness and contrast controls, the only options available were colour temperature, gamma settings and a choice between a “wide” and “standard” colour gamut.

This doesn’t leave much scope for fine-tuning images when you’re watching movies or playing games, but once we’d selected the “wide” colour gamut option and turned the lights off, our images looked great. Colours were bright, vivid and accurate, and we didn’t feel any need to adjust anything else in the menu settings.

The Elmo BOXi-T350 is a good portable projector, but our main concern is the price. You don’t have to spend much more to buy the Optoma ML550, which has a wider range of ports, a quieter fan and a brighter lamp. The T350’s lack of internal memory also makes it less versatile than the Asus P1M.