Canon - LV-7265

Canon has built a reputation for producing high quality, adaptable and sturdy projectors that will fit the needs of education, business and leisure clients. Three more in its successful LV range have now raced onto the market. The LV-X7 is an entry-level affordable machine aimed at the education sector, while the LV-7260 is a business model that just lacks a few important elements of the top-of-the-range LV-7265 reviewed here.

A compact 310mm x 109mm x 265mm in size and weighing just 3.1kg, the LV-7265 is housed in a stylish cream and silver casing and is designed to function as a multimedia projector in anything from a 'box' room to a boardroom. The 200W NSH lamp gives you a brightness of 2,500 lumens (1,900 in Quiet Mode) which means you don't have to draw the blinds to start your presentation, and Canon promises a lamp longevity of around 3,000 hours of operation.

Your minimum projection distance is 1.1m, and even if you need a 100-inch image the minimum throw is only 2.8m. The wide-angle zoom lens is 1.6x, manually controlled with a 600:1 contrast ratio, and outputs a resolution range from XGA (1024 x 768) through UXGA (1600 x 1200) to SXGA (1280 x 1024) using high-quality compression.

Unlike the LV-7260, the LV-7265 contains a built-in DVI-I interface for perfect reproduction of digital signals from PCs or other digital video sources such as DVDs, plus a VGA output for an external monitor as well as S-Video, Component, Composite, VGA and audio inputs. There is also an in-built 5W speaker.

In terms of operation, it's simply a matter of attaching the appropriate lead, switching on the power button on the projector and the lamp is up and running within 8 seconds. The on-screen menu can be activated either via the controls on top of the projector or via the supplied remote control. As well as five automatic image settings (Presentation, Video, Cinema, Standard and sRGB, which can also be manually adjusted) you are offered eight colour correction settings so that your images don't melt into the shade of the background wall.

If you need to leave the projector running for a while, you can program the shut-off for any time between 30 minutes and 16 hours, thus preserving power and energy, and the lamp cools down rapidly; within 40 seconds. The Automatic Vertical Keystone Adjustment allows you to compensate for a tilt factor of 30 degrees and you can reduce the noise levels to around 29dB when in Quiet Mode. The other useful extra is the Wireless Mouse Control which means you can dispense with a pointer and instead use the remote like a mouse.(itreviews.co.uk)