ViewSonic PJ256D DLP Projector

I purchased this projector as a possible replacement for my PJ250. The PJ250 is an awesome little projector, but it could be a little brighter and even a little zoom would be helpful in some situations.

My first disappointment when I received the projector was that it was larger than the 250. I didn't compare the specs carefully to see this ahead of time. It was obviously not too bright to just assume that their latest "palm sized" projector would be at least as small or smaller than the model it replaced. It's larger in all dimensions, but most notably in height. Unfortunately, it's the height that most affects how well it fits into a laptop case along with a laptop, which is how I often carry it. I could afford considerable more length or width and be just fine, but the extra height makes it an uncomfortable squeeze. Keep in mind that when you read the dimensions on height that it's giving you the height at the shortest point. This projector slopes up to a wider point around the lens. If I didn't already have a smaller projector though, the size might not have bothered me. After all, it still is very small. Many people will be just fine with it, or might find it an very acceptable trade-off for the extra brightness.

The brightness of this little projector is definitely its strong point. Given the size, it's amazing how much brighter its 1500 lumens appears compared to the 1000 lumens of the PJ250 it replaces. You sure don't need to turn out all the lights with this baby! I used this in a room with most of the overhead lights on except for the one right above the screen.

My excitement over how bright this projector was faded quickly as I began to explore. Within the first ten minutes of using the projector the remote stopped working. I replaced the batteries to no avail. I soon realized that it actually hadn't stopped working completely, but was just intermittent. And when it did work, I'd sometimes have to press a button two or three times before it would respond. Because of this, I'd get impatient and be quick to press multiple times, often overshooting my menu item. But often it simply didn't work, even when pointed directly at the IR receiver window from just a few feet away. Next I tried navigating with the buttons on the top of the projector. Navigation and the menu system were easy (much better than a PJ350 that I own!). However, after a few minutes the whole thing locked up and none of the buttons would respond, including the power button. I had to pull the power cord!

Having given up with the mouse, I continued working with on it by using the buttons on the projector. My first task was to try to adjust color. I had opened an application that we often demo and found that our nice light blue colored menu bars were a dull grey on the screen. I tried every type of color adjustment I could find, but could never get a nice blue out of it. Next, I opened another application we show that displays listings using alternating white and beige bars. But the beige was also grey. A web page that had a light pink background on some of the product boxes was just an ugly mud color. I must have spend 20 minutes on each of these projects but could never get any of these colors to come close to what was on my laptop screen. I understand that DLP projectors in general have more of a problem displaying rich colors compared to LCD projectors, but this one is worse than my other ones. I even tried this with in "whisper mode" thinking that perhaps the extra brightness was part of the problem. No luck. Well, I mostly demo and train on software, so colors are not the most critical thing for me, so I moved onto the next item.

My next step was to make sure everything was clear and in focus. I quickly discovered that whether using keystone correction or not that when I had the text at the very top portions of the screen in perfect focus, the bottom was just slightly off and visa-versa. It was not so bad that most people would notice, but it was disappointing to not be able to get the entire image crisp and clear.

In examining the text, I noticed that some letters seemed to be thicker than others, almost as if they were bold. Some got quite thin, to the point that thin vertical lines almost disappeared, based on where they were on the screen. I found that by playing with some of the image settings like the phase setting that the areas o the screen where this problem occurred would change. I could never quite get rid of it everywhere at the same time. Just when I'd get everything along the left side looking good, like the text on the desktop icons, other items, like the test on the right most minimized apps on the task bar would display the problem. If you've ever had an older laptop when they first started using higher resolution screens, like 1024 X 767, and you've set the screen down to a lower resolution, like 800 X 600, then you may have seen a similar effect. Some of the earlier LCD displays would exhibit this problem too (some cheap ones still do) if you try running them at something lower than their "native" resolution. They just don't do a good job at down-scaling the image. Well, this was a similar effect.

With a little more experimenting, I discovered that the use of keystone correction was causing much of this problem. Once I set it to not use any digital keystone correction the problem almost disappeared. It was interesting to watch the keystone correction adjust the image too, because it was very different that what I've seen on other projectors. It seemed to just compress the top of the image horizontally as it went, rather than giving the appearance that the whole image was actually rotating around a center horizontal axis until straight up and down, as I've seen with others.

In another comparison to the PJ250 I found that this model doesn't have as wide-angle of an image. To get the same size image I have to move the projector considerably further back. I wouldn't necessarily consider the 250 to be a "short throw" lens, but is was reasonable. This model though is just too darn small of an image. I thought the zoom would be nice to have for making small adjustments to image size (it's not a powerful one), but I think that I'd always have it on full wide and be longing for more in that direction.

So in the end, this projector did have the advantage of a nice, bright image, especially for the size, but with both poor color, and poor text, in addition to an issue with the remote, I had to conclude that this projector was not for me, so I did not keep it. My old PJ250 may not be the brightest little projector, but it's not too its 1000 lumens is decent and its tiny little size is fantastic. So I'll keep using it awhile longer.