Acer H6510BD review

While most home cinema projectors are comparatively dim and designed for use in a darkened room, the DLP Acer H6510BD has a bright 3,000 ANSI lumens lamp. This means it's more of an all-round projector that you can use in a lit room. With so many Full HD (1,920x1,080) projectors costing around £800, this brightness means that H6510B is something a bit different.

As well as being bright, it's flexible, so you can use it as an occasional projector if you don't want to permanently mount it. The H6510BD is quite light and compact, so it’s perfectly suited to sitting on a coffee table, and its height-adjustable feet at the front and back meant we had no problem aligning the image to our screen. Its 1.3x optical zoom is quite limited, but we could still fill our screen from roughly 7ft away. There's no lens shift and only digital keystone control, which affect picture quality. You'll need to manually place the projector square-on to your screen to get the best picture.

The lamp is rated at 4,000 hours at full brightness and 5,000 hours in economy mode. This gives the projector very reasonable running costs of 6p and 5p per hour, respectively.

Setting the H6510BD up was simple, as it has a wide variety of connections round the back. There are two HDMI, VGA, composite, component and S-video inputs, as well as a VGA output and a mini-USB service port. The H5610BD also has 2W mono speakers integrated into the chassis, but we’d recommend plugging in a pair of speakers to its 3.5mm audio output or using a home cinema amplifier instead, as the internal speakers are tinny with very little bass.

Sound issues aside, our initial impressions were encouraging. We found the picture looked best with the lights turned off, but we could still see a reasonably good image in our brightly lit test room, so you should still get a good picture even with a few lights on in the background.

We were a little disappointed to see some ghosting during some fast camera pans, but on the whole images looked sharp with bright and vibrant colours thanks to its 3,000 ANSI lumen lamp. We were also impressed with its high contrast levels, as we could pick out a high level of detail in all of our test footage. As this is a DLP projector there's the rainbow effect to deal with, although it wasn't that noticeable and only really reared its head in high contrast scenes.

You can choose from Standard, Movie, Dark Cinema, Game, Sports and Bright modes, but sadly none of them can be customised. Any attempt to change the brightness, contrast, colour temperature, gamma, individual colour values or noise reduction settings will automatically switch you over to the User mode. It's a shame that you can't merely tweak a preset.