PRODUCT REVIEW — MAY 25, 2006
Dell 2400MP Portable DLP Projector
When Dell’s PR people told me they were rolling out a 3,000-lumens DLP front business projector for just under $1,100, I was skeptical to say the least. Guess what? They really did, and I’ve got a review of it, too.
I don’t review too many business projectors these days. That’s because the market is flooded with “me too” projectors sporting nearly identical feature sets and specifications at similar prices. And prices have dropped so far that you really can’t go wrong now if you are buying what I call a “generic” projector — XGA (1024x768) resolution, varifocal lens, image compatibility to at least SXGA+, and 2500 lumens or so.
However, the 2400MP is the first projector I’ve ever seen to offer a performance-to-price ratio under 50 cents per lumen (it actually works out to about 36 cents per lumen) and for that reason alone, it was worthy of a review. What do you get exactly for eleven hundred bucks? Let’s find out.
Figure 1. Dell’s 2400MP isn’t a styling wonder, but it is very functional and compact, too.
OUT OF THE BOX
Make no mistake about it; this is a bare-bones projector. It’s fairly compact, but at 5.5 pounds, it’s not a microportable. The housing is about 11” by 8” by 4”, so it will need its own carrying bag, one that might also carry a notebook computer or small DVD player.
The housing is finished in a dark silver-and-black finish and the lens is mounted off-center. There are several large grille areas around the sides that are used for cooling and for the internal speaker.
The supplied lens is a standard varifocal type with a zoom ratio of 1.2:1, and I found the manual zoom lever mechanism on the loose side. On the imaging side, the 2400MP uses a single .7” 1024x768 digital micromirror device (DMD), the workhorse of portable, low-cost DLP projectors.
As far as connector options go, you’ll get composite and S-video inputs along with a 15-pin VGA-style jack for computer and component video signals. A second 15-pin jack is used for a loop-through. RS-232 and USB jacks finish off the list, and there are two 1/8” mini audio jacks — one for audio in, and one for audio output.
REMOTE AND MENUS
The supplied remote control is simplicity itself with just 18 buttons to operate. The main navigation buttons are near the top of the remote, perhaps a bit too close to the power button for my taste. (It’s easy to hit the wrong button when you aren’t looking.) The medium blue-on-black color scheme also makes it difficult to see the right button in a darkened room.
The 2400MP’s lens has positive image offset, so you’ll need to place it on a low table or desk if you want to keep the image from sitting too high on a screen or wall. There’s no mechanical lens shift to compensate for tilted projector legs — you’ll have to use the digital keystone correction circuit, which may result in aliased, jagged edges to images.
Input selection is serial in operation and the projector automatically scans for active inputs each time you push the Source button. You can also select from several preset picture modes (User, PC, Movie, sRGB, Game) and two aspect ratios (Full 4:3 and Letterbox).
The menu icons are arrayed nicely across the top of the screen and each menu drops down when selected. The text on each menu could be a bit larger for my tastes as some menu choices were hard to read. In addition to basic image adjustments, you can also set red, green, and blue drive, change the white level in ten steps, and scroll through four different factory Degamma settings (1.8, 2.2, 2.28, and 2.6).
The projector also sports an Autosync feature. Simply connect your PC or video source, push the button (if the projector hasn’t detected a signal already), and wait as the projector determines the pixel clock and sync format information. If all goes well, you’ll have a nicely centered and correctly displayed image each time. You can, of course, go into the menu and make pixel clock and H/V adjustments manually, if you aren’t happy with the results.
There are other presets for master volume, menu timeout, menu position and opacity, and a custom logo that can be displayed onscreen each time you turn the projector on. (Something along the lines of “Stolen from State University’s AV department!” comes to mind.) For those users who “think green”, there’s also a lamp economy mode which saves power, albeit with reduced image brightness.
ON THE TEST BENCH
After calibrating the 2400MP for best grayscale image and adjusting the white balance as close to D6500 as possible, I measured 2621 ANSI lumens with the white boost set at 8, and 2590 ANSI lumens with the white segment turned back to 2. As a result, I have no doubt the projector can hit 3000 lumens in one of its factory high-contrast picture modes, but I’m not sure what the resulting grayscale images would look like.
Speaking of contrast, I measured 531:1 ANSI (average) and 910:1 peak contrast with an XGA PC test pattern signal and white boost at 8. You’ll certainly be able to see data and graphics clearly from this projector under normal room lighting, but if you want to watch video under controlled lighting and are a bit fussier about white balance, tame the grayscale by cranking down the 2400MP’s image brightness and contrast controls and expect to see average contrast ratios drop into the 250:1 range, with peak contrast hitting 460:1.
The supplied lens isn’t as sharp through its range as I would like. It shifts focus slightly as you zoom, and text never seemed as crisp to me as it should have. The projector also has a slight hot spot. I measured average brightness uniformity at 67% and uniformity to the worst corner at 53%, which isn’t particularly good performance in this day and age. But that might be the consequence of using lower-cost optics.
That white boost control is a bit funky. If you turn it up, adding more passes of the white color wheel segment, images certainly get brighter, but colors appear to be muted and “dirty”. If you turn it all the way down, colors appear to be more saturated and cleaner. I’d suggest leaving the white segment off if you want to watch video, as colors will appear more accurate across the board this way.
Figure 2. Here’s a color spectral plot from the 2400MP, and it shows all colors to be undersaturated. The white segment was shut off for this test.
Figure 3. The 2400MP’s grayscale has a tendency to drift upwards from the calibration point.
IMAGE QUALITY
No question this projector does best with a steady diet of computer graphics, data, text, and photos. Those images had the most “snap” whereas video, particularly HD content, was not as crisp. 720p and 1080i HD signals are always letterboxed to 1024x576 resolution, as are 480p images from DVD.
This projector’s composite video performance leaves much to be desired. The 2400MP’s decoder removed most of the detail at 300 and 400 lines from the Zone Plate sequence on the Video Essentials DVD, and left plenty of cross-color moiré along the way. The Realta HQV DVD revealed lots of scan line “twitter” and artifacts on the rotating bars and waving flag sequences, although detection of 3:2 film content was quick. (Variable frame rate sequences were not detected cleanly.)
I also saw evidence of scan line artifacts on scaled 480i-line content, particularly around the edges of text. As far as signal bandwidth is concerned, the 2400MP can pass 720p and 1080i signals to 18 MHz cleanly, but above that, you’ll see severe roll-off in image detail. Since the projector has not digital (DVI or HDMI) input, you can’t make HD images look any better.
The Autosync circuit works very well. It recognized and set up correctly fine “H” text patterns for VGA, SVGA, XGA/48/56/60, SXGA 64/91, SXGA+/64, and UXGA/75. It also handled 480i/30, 480p/60, 576i/p, 720p/60, 1080i/25/30, and 1080p/50/60 DTV rates, as well as 848x480 widescreen.
OTHER NOTES
Don’t expect much from the internal speaker. It’s working pretty hard at 2 watts, which is fine for a small room but not nearly enough for conference rooms or hotel ballrooms. Speaking of working hard, the projector housing gets really, REALLY warm after a few minutes of operation — too warm to touch atop the exhaust grille. Let it cool down all the way before you pick it up!
As far as power consumption is concerned, I ran the 2400MP for three hours with the bulb operating in standard mode, and power consumption totaled .955 kilowat-hours. Assuming an electric rate of eight cents per kilowatt-hour ($0.08/kW-Hr), the 2400MP used $0.076, or $0.025 per hour. That works out to $25 for every thousand hours. Your electric rate, no doubt, will vary (and probably be much higher!).
CONCLUSIONS
Dell’s 2400MP projector is a good value for the money, if you don’t expect too much of it. As a general-purpose computer data and graphics projector, it works exceptionally well. But for 4:3 video projection, it needs help, like a clean 480p video source. HDTV content is always letterboxed and could be a lot sharper — a direct consequence of using lower-cost optics.
Still, the Autosync circuit and input scanning make this projector almost foolproof, and even though there’s no digital input, you can hook up pretty much any analog video or computer signal format you want to the 2400MP. (You’ll need a component adapter cable for the 15-pin jack, something that Dell has thoughtfully included in the accessories box.) The remote is also a plug-and-play design. While it could use a little improvement in terms of legibility and button layout and size, it does the job.
So — you can get 3,000 lumens — or doggone close to it — for just over a thousand bucks! Like last year’s low-cost SXGA+ 5100MP, this projector breaks new ground in price and performance, which will surely create much envy and gnashing of teeth from competitors at InfoComm 2006. It will be interesting to see which of them respond to meet this challenge…
