Elmo BOXi-T350 review
Elmo may not be a household name in the UK, but this Japanese company has been making business and education projectors since the 1920s. The BOXi-T350 fits into both of these categories, but it’s also one of Elmo’s first mobile DLP projectors that’s also aimed at home users.
Weighing just 500g and measuring 132x143x43mm, it’s almost as small as the Best Buy-winning Optoma ML550, so it won’t take up much room on a shelf or in your bag. The 300 ANSI lumen lamp isn’t as bright as other portable projectors we’ve tested, but its long lamp life of 20,000 hours means you shouldn’t have to replace the BOXi-T350’s LED for a long time. The BOXi-T350 doesn’t have an internal battery, though, so you’ll need to take its power supply with you if you want to use it away from the home or office.
We were a little concerned its lamp wouldn’t be powerful enough to cope with our brightly lit test room, but we could see our test PowerPoint presentation clearly. Black-on-white and white-on-black text was perfectly legible, even with our test room’s lights on, and the BOXi-T350’s manual focus ring made it easy to increase the clarity of the picture. This is a good projector to use if you want to show a presentation to colleagues without plunging the boardroom into cinema-like darkness.
However, we’d recommend extinguishing lights when viewing photos and movies, as it was hard to make out colours and detail in our test photos and movies in our brightly lit lab.
The BOXi-T350’s native 1,280x800 resolution looked sharp, and its short throw range meant we didn’t have to place it very far away from the wall to get a large picture. We managed an 84in diagonal screen size from roughly 2m away, so it’s great for placing on a coffee table or the floor, and there are two small height-adjustable feet on the bottom of the projector to help aim the picture upwards.
You won’t want to sit too close to the BOXi-T350, though, as the projector’s fan is considerably louder than many other portable projectors we’ve tested, producing 47d(B)A with Eco mode switched off. The fan can be irritating if you’re using it for long periods of time in silence or aren’t playing any music to help drown out the noise.