Toshiba S20 projector

A budget model with boardroom tendencies

At less than a grand, this projector is certainly cheap, but does it have the chops to cut it as a home cinema machine? First impressions aren't great, because while Toshiba may be trying to market this model as a light box for the living room, the styling and the complement of connectors on the rear make it clear that it was really designed with business use in mind.

To achieve the rock-bottom pricing, some corners have obviously been cut. Round the back you get two D-sub connectors for hooking the machine up to a PC, but only S-video and composite sockets for connecting it to a DVD player or TV set-top box. There's no Scart socket and, more importantly, no DVI connector, although you can buy an optional adaptor cable for the device that enables you to run component video from a DVD player into one of the D-sub sockets.

In use, the unit struggles to draw detail out of darker scenes in movies, and the rainbow effect that afflicts many budget DLP projectors is very much in evidence - a result of having a slow colour wheel. The machine is also quite noisy, even in the low-lamp-power eco mode, so it can prove a little distracting during the quieter passages in movies.

The S20's main competitor is the X2 from InFocus. While it's marginally quieter than the X2, it loses out to its rival in terms of overall image quality. So although the price is undoubtedly attractive, we really wish Toshiba could have eked out a bit more performance from this model.