The Acer H 7530 D is a Full HD DLP projector released in summer 2009. Full HD projectors were unthinkable in this price range just a few years ago: The Acer currently sells from about 900 GBP online.

Reviewed by Florian Friedrich on March 17, 2010

Excellent colours.
Sharp, bright HDTV pictures.
Small, handy, and portable.
Integrated colour management.

Weaknesses in the automatic iris adjustment.
Serious DLP colour strobing.
Poor BrilliantColor presets.
Slight colouration in black images.

The Acer H 7530 offers both superb design and practical features for on-the-go use. What’s more, it provides bright, colourful, and crisp HDTV projections. On the down side, the outdated DLP colour wheel produces some nasty picture errors, which — even at the low price — are tough to live with.

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A Foreword on the Sub-£1,000 Price Class

How times have changed: Just a few years ago, you’d have to fork out at least 2,000 GBP for a Full HD projector. Now, big electronics stores are selling the devices for three-figure sums. With today’s pricing, projectors are therefore becoming increasingly tempting buys for the mass market and, thus, the living room. Our projector reviews have shown that even cheap projectors — apart from some small weaknesses — can produce astonishingly good Full HD pictures.

Features and Design

A projector with sound: The Acer accepts audio signals via HDMI or mini jack and plays them back through its small built-in speaker.

This small projector is especially suited to mobile use, which is clear when you take a look at its dimensions (9.5 x 29.4 x 22.9 cm). In keeping with this, it’s got a built-in speaker and surprise features such as a picture-in-picture function for a second video source. There’s even an automatic keystone correction that works using a sensor: If the projector has to shine diagonally downwards or upwards onto the screen, the necessary keystone correction automatically kicks in.

Tinted video presets allow you to project onto coloured walls, although this turns out to be counterproductive in practice, since some settings simply intensify the discolouration. Despite the compact construction, the Acer achieves a maximum brightness of 1,900 lumens. It can therefore deliver decent contrast even in day-lit rooms, albeit with unnatural-looking colours.

Operation

The few buttons on the remote control remain clearly recognisable in the dark.

During installation, you should bear in mind the short focal distance of the 1.2x zoom and the large picture offset. Seeking out the correct settings turns out to be a real test of the user’s patience: All eight presets deliver an incorrect colour temperature and inaccurate colours. But with a lot of time and patience, we managed to find an acceptable solution: Select the “Standard” preset, set “Degamma” to 1, and deactivate “BrilliantColor” — this’ll tease a decent picture and natural colours out of the Acer. It’s a mystery to us why the manufacturer hasn’t provided suitable presets in the first place.

Further irritation stems from the projector’s insistence on switching back into “BrilliantColor” mode, which is brighter but produces inaccurate colours. You’ll probably also want rid of the automatic iris function (“DynamicBlack”), which adjusts slowly and is accompanied by large-area flicker. The motor also makes an absolute racket, and the Acer’s pronounced colour strobing is far from what you’d expect from a modern DLP projector with Dark Chip 2 technology.

Picture Quality of Standard-Definition Signals

Here, the Acer starts off surprisingly well, delivering excellent de-interlacing in films. Even in tricky sequences, flicker barely appears on moving edges. Although SDTV video has slight picture-cropping (overscan) even via HDMI, all inputs produce decent pictures with sufficient sharpness and fine-detail reproduction.

The Acer’s colour space is almost correct.

Colours look intense but not unnatural, and we were impressed by the high ANSI contrast (460:1), attractive sharpness, and powerful white — especially in bright, vibrant scenes. In dark scenes, on the other hand, slight red colouration (shading) is visible in the top right corner. What’s particularly disappointing is that all moving objects are accompanied by strong red, green, and blue colour strobing — and this really isn’t the kind of subtle artefact you can just ignore. Even 10-year-old DLP projectors perform better in this respect.

Picture Quality of High-Definition Signals

Unfortunately, the colour-saturation control is inactive for HDMI signals, unlike for the analogue video inputs. There’s an alternative, but it’s an awkward one: You can set the six primary and secondary colours individually in the colour-management menu. You should always input Blu-ray films as progressive video, since 1080i interlaced material tends to flicker on the Acer. On the other hand, the de-interlacing of HDTV documentaries delivered by a satellite receiver in interlaced format is flawless.

Films in 24p format pose no problems for the Acer and display with excellent motion clarity. In principle, the Acer’s pictures are actually very attractive, if it weren’t for the rainbow effects described above. The edges of quick-moving objects show blue and red fringes (“DLP colour breakup”), and even moving your head slightly or blinking is enough to cause colour strobing.

Ideal Settings

Display Mode: Standard

Brightness: 51

Contrast: 0

Color Temperature: 1

Degamma: 1

Aspect Ratio: Auto

Sharpness: 7

ECO Mode: Off

BrilliantColor: Off

DynamicBlack: Off

These settings apply to realistic playback of HDTV/Blu-ray material through the HDMI interface in a darkened environment. Manufacturing and HDMI playback device deviations might necessitate slight adjustment.