Optoma   ML-1500   WXGA  1500 Ansi Lumens  LED  Projector

An WXGA, 1500 Lumens Bright LED Projector with a vast range of adjustment, and BrightEra for higher quality colour and a longer lifespan and superior images and a long-lasting, low maintenance performance.

If you need to display presentations directly from a USB flash drive, the ML1500 is for you. It's compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Word files, as well as PDF files, JPG and BMP images and AVI, DIVX, MPEG and MKV videos. Annoyingly, it doesn’t support audio files such as MP3s even though it has no trouble playing audio on a video.

The ML1500 has a maximum resolution of 1280x800 pixels, so it isn’t full-HD. Nonetheless, image quality is fairly good and the 1500 lumen LED display performs very well for a device of this size. The screen is bright and text is certainly crisp, but the darker areas of our test photographs lost a lot of detail when we viewed them with the office lights turned on. Video performance is reasonable, although there’s a noticeable amount of juddering in fast panning shots.

There are no user-customisable picture options available, just Bright, PC, Cinema and Photo. Of these, we’d only recommend PC. In our tests, it increased brightness and contrast and allowed us to see much more detail in darker videos and pictures.

The ML1500 is also 3D-ready, but you'll have to buy Optoma ZD301 3D glasses for around £70 in order to view 3D footage. The 6W speakers on the device are useful to liven up presentations, they lack enough volume for sustained use, but you can add something beefier, even when on the go, thanks to the minijack output.