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Acer’s H7531D is a Full HD 1080p home cinema projector firmly aimed at the living room. It’s small enough to sit on a book shelf, so you should have no trouble finding somewhere to put it. Plus, it’ll look great wherever it goes thanks to its attractive white and silver case.
A decent array of ports on the back make it fairly simple to connect to your existing setup – two HDMI ports, component, S-Video and VGA outputs should be enough for most equipment. The single 3.5mm audio input isn’t so useful: the feeble 2w speaker isn’t going to challenge a proper hi-fi system. It could at least make itself heard over the cooling fan, which stayed very quiet even after a few hours’ use.
There are a few controls on the top of the unit, but you’ll mostly rely on the remote control to tweak picture settings. It’s hardly comprehensive, but there are zoom and aspect ratio controls. Lens adjustments are manual, though, so you can only alter the picture digitally without reaching for the projector itself. Keystone correction is present as expected, but degrades image quality.
The on-screen menu system is plain, yet easy to navigate – picture options include brightness, contrast and colour tone, as well as tint, saturation and black levels. If you prefer using presets, there are eight different picture modes – Movie and Sports look the best, creating the most accurate flesh tones and balanced colours. Game and Presentation both pushed the brightness too far, creating a washed-out image.
The 2,000 lumen lamp might suggest the H7531D is bright enough to use with the lights on, but we found that it was easily overwhelmed by ambient light, making darker scenes hard to see. Turning down the lights and closing the curtains made a huge difference, preserving detail in the dimly lit opening scenes of Casino Royale. Unfortunately, this also highlighted the distracting DLP rainbow effect – black and white scenes suffered the most, but it was less pronounced in scenes with bright colours. As is colour wheel spins only three times per frame, you’re more likely to spot the rainbow effect in the H7531D than in other projectors with faster colour wheels. If you’re particularly susceptible to the effect, this alone may be enough to put you off.
Looking past this problem, image quality was reasonably good, with fairly accurate colours once we’d spent some time in the settings menus. Static shots looked great, but fast-moving scenes suffered from some noticeable artefacts and weren’t smooth. With no options for motion smoothing or noise reduction, you’re limited to whatever settings your source devices support. For a 1080p projector Blu-ray movies didn’t look quite as sharp as we’d expect.
At £750, the H7531D is fairly inexpensive for a 1080p projector. It lacks some of the more advanced features of the more expensive competition, but has everything you would want for a home cinema. However, you’re better off spending £10 more on the BenQ W1060 which has a much sharper picture and better image quality at default settings.
