DreamVision Dreamy

We really love projectors, but this one has no love for us.

Once you’ve gone projector, there’s no going back. You’ll be tempted to never visit the local cinema again, and big screen gaming is quite simply eye ball exploding. The DreamVision Dreamy comes in towards the low end of the projector range, and while it’s got a lot going for it, there’s one major sticking point that makes it hard to recommend for home theatre wannabes If you’re one of those projector heads who is a stickler for resolution.

When your image is over 100 inches across, you want the pixels to be as small as possible. It’s in this regard that the Dreamy falls flat on its butt, with a native resolution of only 854x480.

Pixels are easy to spot, even though the fact that it’s a DLP projector helps to negate this a little. At this price point, it’s easy to find a true HD (1280 x 720) LCD projector. You’ll also need to mount the Dreamy in a relatively wide room, as it doesn’t have a short throw lens, and it also lacks any kind of lens shift.

Where it can’t be faulted is in its rich reproduction of colours and impressive contrast ratio (which is quoted on paper as 2400:1). It makes the picture from a Sanyo Z3 look like a washed out bad photo copy. DLP projectors are unbeatable in this regard – it’s just a pity that they cost a hell of a lot more for high-res variants when compared to LCD projectors. Fan noise is about as loud as a squirrel’s fart, and the bulb life is on par with other entry level projectors, at 2000 hours standard, 3000 hours low power. The rainbow effect didn’t seem too nasty, and this reviewer is particularly sensitive to this stomach churning problem with DLP.

Unfortunately, with the 360 just around the corner making the need for true HD resolution an absolute must, it’s the low resolution of the Dreamy that hurts it the most. If it was a $2000 projector we could forgive it, but at this price anything less than 720P is easy to overlook.