ViewSonic PLED-W500

Add the ViewSonic PLED-W500 ($700 street) to the rapidly growing category of sub-three-pound micro LED projectors, a category that so far consists of minor variations on a theme. Like all the other projectors in the category, including the Optoma ML500 ($650 street, 3.5 stars) and the Acer K330 ($600, 3.5 stars), the PLED-W500 is built around red, green, and blue LEDs plus a DLP chip, and it offers a 500 lumen brightness rating with a claimed WXGA (1,280 by 800) native resolution. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer anything to justify its higher price, but it's a reasonable choice otherwise.

The PLED-W500 is one of the lighter projectors in this category, at 2.6 pounds, and it's also one of the smaller ones, at 1.6 by 8.4 by 6.4 inches. However, there isn't much difference between any of these models on either score, with the full range of weights currently 2.5 to 2.9 pounds. It comes with a soft carrying case that includes a pouch for its remote, cables, and power cord. (There is no power block.)

Setup is standard. The projector's back panel includes a VGA port for a computer, an HDMI port for a computer or video source, and both composite video and S-Video ports. In addition, the projector can free you from having to carry a computer or video source by reading files directly from an SD Card, USB memory key, or internal memory. ViewSonic says it can read most common image, video, and audio files (including JPG, WMV, and MP3), as well as PDF and Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word files.

Finally, ViewSonic says you can display an image over a USB cable connected to its mini USB port. However, as with all of the USB display features I've tested lately, its level of reliability is strictly plug and pray. I tried it with four systems running three different versions of Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) and got it to work only with one of the two XP systems. As of this writing, ViewSonic is investigating the problem.

Brightness
As I pointed out when reviewing the ML500 and K330, a 500 lumen rating may sound far too underpowered compared with the 3,000 lumen ratings typical of today's lamp-based portable projectors, like the Editors' Choice NEC Display Solutions NP-M300WS ($1,099 direct, 4 stars), but it's brighter than you may think.

Perception of brightness is logarithmic, which means that a 500 lumen image looks much more than one sixth as bright as a 3000 lumen image. In fact, it's bright enough so I was able to test the K330, for example, using a 78-inch (2 meter) wide image, which is the size I normally use with standard projectors, as opposed to the smaller image sizes I use with palmtops.

The PLED-W500 is very much in the same league as the K330 for brightness. However, it suffers from a soft focus effect that makes text harder to read than it should be for any given screen size. In trying to find an appropriate image size, I started out at 78 inches wide thinking it was bright enough for a moderate level of ambient light, but found text a little hard to read. After moving the projector closer and closer to the screen, I settled on a 48-inch wide (57-inch diagonal) image.

Data Image Quality
On our standard suite of DisplayMate tests, the PLED-W500 sailed through most screens without a problem. Among other good points, it maintained even brightness across the screen, offered good color balance with suitably neutral grays, and delivered vibrant, fully saturated color.

As with the ML500 and K330, however, the PLED-W500 suffers from scaling artifacts?unwanted extra patterns added to patterned fills, like an area filled with dots?at the claimed native resolution. And as I discussed in some detail in the ML500 and K330 reviews, this simply shouldn't happen. If the native resolution is really 1,280 by 800, there shouldn't be any need to scale a 1,280 by 800 resolution image to make it fit.

The artifacts won't be an issue for most people, because they show only on images with fills of closely spaced dots or lines over a large area. However, the scaling is likely responsible for the soft focus effect, an issue I also saw with the ML500 and K330. In all three cases, the soft focus is likely the result of anti-aliasing techniques to counter scaling artifacts. For the PLED-W500, the soft focus made black on white text hard on the eyes by making the text look grayer. In my tests, it was particularly hard to read at sizes smaller than 9 points.

Video Image quality and Other Issues
The PLED-W500's video image quality is good enough to watch, but well short of impressive. I saw some slight motion artifacts and obvious lack of contrast, but the projector did a reasonably good job on retaining shadow detail (details based on shading), and I didn't see any posterization (colors changing suddenly even where they should change gradually) on scenes that tend to bring out those problems.

The one real issue for video is relatively frequent rainbow artifacts, with light areas breaking up into little red-green-blue rainbows. Rainbow artifacts are a potential issue for any single-chip DLP projector, because of the way DLP chips create color. The PLED-W500, like most DLP projectors, shows this rainbow effect more often with video than with data. More to the point, if you're sensitive to seeing the rainbows, as I am, you may consider them too annoying for anything but short video clips on this projector

Very much on the plus side, the 2-watt mono speaker offers good quality sound with enough volume to fill a small conference room. As with all LED projectors, the light source is meant to last the life of the unit, with a 20,000 hour lifetime. Also worth mention is that the projector is 3D ready. However, the 3D works only with computers with Quad-buffered, Open GL 3D-compatible graphics cards.

The ViewSonic PLED-W500's balance of small size, low weight, image quality, and features?like being able to read files from an SD card or USB key?makes it a reasonable choice if you need a highly portable projector. It doesn't offer anything to justify the higher price compared with its direct competition, but if you find it at a competitive price, it's worth considering.

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