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GCN LAB REVIEW: The Samsung L300 was extremely accurate in almost all of our testing, but its extreme size keeps it out of the portable market.
Samsung Electronics America’s L300 was extremely accurate in almost all of our testing, but its extreme size keeps it out of the portable market.
The L300 is 12.25 inches long and 11.9 inches wide. It tips the scales at 8 pounds, 10.8 ounces, double the weight of most laptop PCs. At least the extra size is put to good use: The projector has two VGA inputs so two computers could be connected to it for complex presentations. It also supports S-Video and component video.
In testing, the L300 shined. Text looked great down to 9-point size, one of the best in the review. And colors were extremely accurate. Reds and blues in particular were nearly identical to their real-world counterparts. The L300 also did well in color stepping tests in which one color is repeated with slight variations over a 64-step grid. Only at the very light end of the scale did the fine colors tend to blend. At the darker end, it was as close to perfect as you can get.
The L300 performed flawlessly in color registration, with no errors in either red/green or the much more difficult red/blue tests. Very fine lines were rendered on top of one another while moving, without a hint of bleeding into nearby pixels.
The projector displayed 810 lumens at the center of an image and 750 lumens in the corners. That’s pretty good in most situations, especially if the lights in a room can be dimmed slightly.
The excellent video testing scores combined with great text display make the L300 a perfect projector for environments such as courtrooms, where evidence must be displayed accurately in various formats and lighting conditions can be at least partially controlled.
However, you would not want to have to move the L300 too much unless you can mount it on a rolling table or something similar because it’s not portable by today’s standards. Then again, with a government price of $799, some people might be able to live with the extra pounds.
Samsung Electronics America, 866-726-4249, www.samsung.com