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GCN LAB REVIEW: ViewSonic’s PJ260D is a great projector if you don’t know what kind of lighting conditions you’ll have to deal with.
ViewSonic’s PJ260D is a great projector if you don’t know what kind of lighting conditions you’ll have to deal with. It was among the brightest in our review, with a 1,160-lumen rating at the center of the screen at a distance of 10 feet. That performance is even more impressive given that the PJ260D weighs only 3 pounds, 1 ounce. That’s a lot of power for a lightweight.
Unfortunately, that raw power can wash out very light images. You can fine-tune the PJ260D to be a little more accurate with bright images, but doing so reduces the lumens it pumps out. The default settings are decent, and you will get a little less washout in dark rooms because you don’t need that much power in those situations. However, the PJ260D will project readable images in a room with standard office lighting. Only direct sunlight would cause a problem.
At the corners, the lumens drop to 970, a noticeable 190-lumen difference that could be a problem it you need to project highly accurate images.
Colors on the PJ260D look good. Blues, reds and greens are accurate, even when displayed on a multistep grid. For color registration, the projector is nearly perfect in the center, but it drifts toward the edges.
The biggest problems with the PJ260D are the physical controls, which seem downright primitive compared with other projectors reviewed here, but they should be easy for ViewSonic to fix. The circular pad of buttons you use to navigate through the menu sits right beside the tiny Power button. On the other side of the Power button is the Enter key for selecting menu choices.
You can see the problem: Pushing Power instead of Enter is an easy enough mistake to make with the lights up, and it’s even more likely to happen in the dark. Combine that with a front lens that must be focused by physically turning it, and you have some difficult controls. Forcing users to handle the lens means that fingers will inevitably touch the glass, resulting in fingerprints on that valuable and vulnerable component.
If you can learn to live with the controls, the PJ260D is a good projector that works in any lighting conditions. With a government price of just $949, it’s a great deal, too.
ViewSonic Corp., 888-881-8781, www.viewsonic.com