If you’re looking to present in front of clients, or if you just want to play a game in a giant format, these projectors are the best we’ve reviewed.
Getting the best business projector for your work can help transform your presentations, and make meetings more engaging and interactive, which means you’ll want to invest in a business projector that provides both impressive image quality and dependability.
If you’re on the road often, then these projectors need to be portable as well – but that doesn’t mean you have to make compromises with connectivity, or with projection size. You’ll find that many small projectors these days can still produce large projections – while also coming with a range of ports for hooking your equipment up.
Buying a projector for work means you’re looking for different features than if you were buying a projector for entertainment purposes, so super-high resolutions and millions of inputs aren’t going to be high on your ‚must have‘ list.
Unfortunately, plenty of offices often cheap out in when buying business projectors, or not doing their research, and investing in headaches for years to come. So now is a good excuse as any to review our favorite options for your office’s projector unit.
Small yet perfectly formed
Sure, we’ve reviewed some portable projectors, and many in this roundup qualify as portable, but the Philips PicoPix PPX2055 is shockingly small. So small, that you wonder what use case demands it be that small, aside from it being able to easily fit into a your briefcase, or even a jacket pocket.
Philips has created a projector so small it could be used to surprise unsuspecting co-workers who were blissfully unaware that a meeting was in their future.
Selling for an affordable price, it features an easy setup and is able to project content only drawing power via USB. However, you’ll need a pitch-black situation to get the 55 lumen-capable lighting to show an image your team can see. It also failed dramatically to hit its advertised projection size of 120″ images, only hitting a still-respectable 50″ mark. Also, if you’re projecting video, which the device can handle (if not especially sharply) consider a secondary speaker to drown out audible noise coming from the spinning DLP wheel.
No nonsense
If your meetings are never in the same location often, you’re going to want a no-nonsense projector that’s easy to carry. For that, we can recommend the Epson EX7235 Pro. Weighing in at 5.29 pounds, and measuring 11.7″ x 9.0″ x 3.0″ (W x D x H), it supports connecting via USB, WiFi, VGA, HDMI, or the mobile MHL. Not only is it easy to move around with, it’s extremely easy to use, so much so that booting and choosing your input source only took a mere 34 seconds in our testing. This is all with an intensely strong lamp, which maxes out at 3000 lumens.
It is ideal for those who need a simple, portable projector for anything except for streaming video, as we experienced quality issues there, with output being either grainy or stuttering. It also suffered from a moment reminiscent of IKEA, with Some Assembly Required. That in 2015 we’re requiring customers to find a screwdriver in order to set up WiFi sounds comically backwards. Sure, the EX7235 Pro doesn’t force users to rely on just WiFi for presenting, but when you’re dealing anything meant for on-the-go, WiFi is the connection of choice for most. Setting up said WiFi wasn’t easy either, but once it’s up, the EX7235 Pro performed like the four-star unit we believe it is.
Bright images, loud noises, good projector
If you’re looking to present in a bright room, or shopping with no worry about price, ViewSonic’s Pro8600, weighing 8.5 pounds and measuring 13.1″ x 10.4″ x 4.3″ (W x D x H), and Pro8520HD, also 8.5 pounds and a very similar 13.1″ x 10.4″ x 4.8″ (W x D x H) are especially relevant. The Pro8600 retails for about $1700 (around £1125, AU$2068) online, and the Pro8520HD can be found online at a bump up to around $1799 (around £1190, AU$2188).
Both machines run very loud and very bright, thanks to the Pro8600’s 6000 lumen and the Pro8520HD’s 5000 lumen capable lamps. So if you’re looking to make presentations to people who drift off when the lights go out, make sure you consider these options. Neither are great with USB, but if you’re looking to present video, both have HDMI slots – the Pro8520HD actually offers two, if that’s something you would need.
Both projectors render HD color video beautifully, although Pro8520HD arguably over-saturates the colors. While the video on the Pro8520HD is of great quality, you’re going to need to have any audio pretty loud, thanks to a whirring fan that hovered around 79 decibels in our testing. While the Pro8600 suffers the same noise pollution – its fan reaches 65 decibels – it does feature a useful ECO mode that can dampen the noise. As you would expect from projectors marketed on their HD quality, these units can get an image large enough for native HD proportions.
The brightest, nicest and best connected palm projector yet
The ML750e by Optoma may not be the smallest projector we’re talking about here, but it’s a lot more powerful than the pocket-sized PicoPix from Phillips. It weighs in at an ultraportable 380g with a small footprint that makes this easy to carry around. The differences in size between this and the PicoPix are negligible for the power you get in return: a 700 Lumens lamp that lets you present in rooms that aren’t completely darkened.
Not only is it port-rich with one MHL-ready HDMI input, a USB 2.0 slot for thumbdrives, a universal I/O slot, and a microSD card slot, but the ML550 handled our 90-inch test screen with impressive results, and peaked at a 60-inch-or-so size. Much like the ViewSonic PLED-W800, though, the ML750e had us grumbling because you need to buy a dongle to achieve WiFi. Which felt as arcane at the time of this projector’s release as it does today. And in another moment that felt anachronistic, there is no way to work with the projector via smartphone or tablet.
Small projector, large projection
Usually when you choose a portable business projector you have to make a few sacrifices in order to have such as small device – but that’s not true with the Epson EB-S31.
Epson has an excellent reputation with business projectors, and it has brought much of its expertise to the EB-S31. Its 3,500 lumen brightness is much brighter than many other portable projectors, and means you have more flexibility when setting up the EB-S31 in environments where there is still ambient light.
The EB-S31 is small and light enough to carry around with you on business trips – but it also has a very large projection size – up to 300 inches – which makes this an incredibly versatile portable business projector.
The first blue laser 3LCD hybrid data projector
The Sony VPL-FHZ55 is designed to be installed once and not moved for a long time. At 26.5 pounds nobody will be volunteering to move it between floors, or even carting it between rooms. It measures 15.3″ x 19.8″ x 5.8″ (W x D x H) and we believe it best positioned on a ceiling, even though that will make it even harder to ever move. With all that size, there is a lot to say about it.
Noteworthy for being the first 3LCD projector – a projection chip technology popularized by Epson and Panasonic – with a lamp-less treatment, thanks to a blue laser light source deployed by Sony. For all that above hype and hubbub, the enormous price should not shock you.
It’s seriousness isn’t just from a top-out of 4,000 lumens, but the fact that it can go for 20,000 hours, reducing the routine expense of replacing burnt out lamps that projectors generally include.
It is connector heavy, as it should be with that price-tag. The right-hand side is a full set of BNC/component inputs, an RGB D-sub 15-pin slot, DVI-D, monitor output and an HDMI input.
