Polaroid Polaview 80 User Reviews

This projector is a classic of its time, using an LCD similar to what you would find in a laptop, and a fresnel diffuser. In short, its a compact OHP, the concept is identical but the many mirrors in this machine allow it to be smaller. It used halogens, which are about £10 each and last for 50 hours a time. If you are only using a projector for a few films and maybe sports every now and then let me tell you that 50 hours it a lot more than it seems. Although the light output really isnt nice from these lamps (whites are yellowish), It wouldnt be fair to fault it just on that basis. 300ANSI lumens, quite a lot for a halogen based machine. It will show up well in a room with ambient light but colours will not look very vivid unless the lights are off completely. The design with the flip up top is ingenious and really makes the unit look smaller. The killer is the resolution, at just 640x480 (VGA), the pixel structure is very verbose. Quality isn't too bad, but it really doesnt like rendering colours in their true form, it certainly cannot display as many colours as any source you would ever plug into it. For example, when watching the snooker, the table colour under shadows is not subtle, its very clunky and blocky. This machine truly was the beginning of the LCD projector race so it cannot be expected to perform well against todays machine. Even so, it will keep you entertained..guaranteed!

Any Problems: Gets very hot, but this is normal and to be expected with halogens. The LCD panel on mine lost entire vertical lines of pixels