Acer P3250

Acer P3250

Superior color quality, well-rounded features, and a great price help the Acer P3250 projector rise toward the top of the heap. If you're pinching pennies, the compact, 2.7-pound Acer P3250 ($791 as of 8/7/09) is the lowest-priced lamp-based projector among the 2-to-3-pound models we tested for our recent ultraportable projectors review, and it has excellent image quality. Its economic advantage includes the cost of its 3000-hour replacement lamp, which is $240, versus a price of well over $300 for the lamps the other models use. However, since the P3250's native resolution is 1024 by 768 (XGA), you'll need to use a laptop running at the same XGA resolution to obtain the best image sharpness and clarity for presentations. The P3250's most praiseworthy feature is the excellent quality of its images. Among the seven projectors we tested (four lamp-based and three LED-based), this model landed in second place for its overall performance, finishing close behind the top-ranked InFocus IN1102. While it delivered crisp, legible fonts in all of its text-rendering tests, it was strongest in displaying colorful images.