Posted on May 9, 2010 By Art Feierman
The Epson PowerLite 85+ was awarded the Best In Classroom Award in our annual Classroom Projector Comparison Report -May 2010.
Update 6-30-11: We recently reviewed the Epson PowerLite 96W, an indirect replacement (with a more advanced feature set) of the 85+. Click here to read the projector review of the new Epson projector, which, like the PowerLite 85+, received our Best In Classroom award, in this year’s Classroom Projector Comparison Report.
Epson has designed yet another great projector for both conference rooms and classrooms. The Epson PowerLite 85+ is in the moderately bright category with a specified light output of 2600 lumens. What is uncommon is Epson’s claim that not only does it project white light at 2600 lumens, but it also projects colored light at 2600 lumens. In our section called Image Quality we will test and explore the claims to see how close to accurate they are. Most projectors do not put out the specified light shown in the specs so it will be interesting to see how this unit performs.
Maintenance is a breeze with the Epson PowerLite 85+. Epson, realizing schools with potentially large numbers of projectors would need a very cost effective way to maintain their AV equipment, designed the projector to be easy to maintain. The lamp is easily cleaned without the use of any tools. Simply pull the filter out, vacuum or replace and you are done. Basically, anyone near the projector could handle it. The lamp is replaceable from the top of the projector. So if ceiling mounted. A screwdriver is all it will take to open the hatch and place in a new lamp. And with its long life lamp, replacement won’t be necessary for quite a long time.
The projectors native resolution of XGA (1024×768) makes it more than capable in your typical K-12 or University environment. It will work equally well in a vocational environment, but depending on what you are teaching, if you need a machine to do higher resolutions for many hours each day, I would recommend looking at a projector that has a higher native resolution. Classroom environments that teach CAD or other engineering software that usually requires a lot of screen real estate might find XGA to not provide the space for all the buttons and interface elements.
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