NEC HT510 review

The brightness of the HT510 is ample at 1,000 ANSI Lumens, but you can drop the bulb power to 800 ANSI Lumens. This will have the added bonus of increasing the lamp life by 50 per cent, from 2,000 hours to 3,000 hours. If you work through the maths of average usage, you should be able to watch 1,000 movies before you need to replace the bulb. Average household television viewing is about 1,000 hours a year, so if you you're using the projector for all your viewing, you'll have to replace it every two years.

The low lamp mode also brings a benefit in noise reduction -- at only 28dB to begin with it's whisper quiet, but knock it down to 26dB and you'll hardly be able to tell it's there. In fact, the projector's quiet operating noise is one of its main attractions. Like the Toshiba TDP-S25, there's also a mono speaker on the projector, but it should only be thought of as a last resort, in case you're making a business presentation. Its 1W power certainly won't give your movies any aural impact.

As the projector offers computer connectivity, a USB input would have been useful. Many business projectors offer this to run images or presentations from a USB memory device, but NEC's move away from the business side means this has been omitted. Many budget projectors feature 4:3 ratio chipsets, making them useless for movie viewing. The NEC HT510 runs in a 16:9 ratio and has a very impressive throw distance. This means you don't have to place the projector a long way from the display (be it a wall or a screen) to enjoy the home cinema experience.

Performance
The HT510 is a decent picture performer, especially when compared to other projectors at this price. The resolution matches that of PAL more or less line for line, and the detail reproduction is spot on. The component inputs also deliver a smooth picture that has natural, accurate colour. Downgrade to composite or S-video and you lose some of the detail, but the picture performance on the whole is very good.

The only thing that hinders this feat is a particularly poor contrast ratio, which reduces any blacks on screen to a mess of indistinguishable greys. As a home cinema projector, this is a problem, as the sort of films you'll probably want to test on your new projector are dark action movies like Aliens and Terminator 2. The detail and natural qualities of the picture make up for it, but if your demands for the HT510 are limted to films, you might want to think about investing more of your hard-earned.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide