Acer H5360

Pros: Bright vivid colors. Low price. HDMI input.

Cons: Lack of an air filter. Poor customer service and customer support. If this is your first projector make sure you're not sensitive to the rainbow effect that DLP projectors produce.

Summary: I bought this projector about 6 months ago for my kids to play video games and watch movies and after about 800 hrs of trouble-free use the projector, it started giving an intermittent 'colorwheel failure' message that wouldn't allow it to start up. What happened was that dust was building up inside the projector on a sensor that prevents the colorwheel from starting up if there's too much static electricity on it. Anyway, Acer fixed the colorwheel failure problem, but they they blew the dust off the sensor and onto some of the internal optics (probably with a can of compressed air, though Acer wont specify how they did it and they wouldn't send me a service manual after they told me to clean the optics myself). Well as soon as I got the unit back from Acer, I sent it back to them, and they sent it straight back to me saying that they tested it and that the video quality was within specs. At this point I called Acer again because, whatever way they used to test the video quality it wasn't good. After talking to two layers of technical support I was transferred to someone in 'corporate customer care'. He ended up saying that the dust inside the projector was my problem because the manual says that I'm not supposed to operate it in dusty environments. I said, "It wasn't operated in a cement factor or a coal mine, it was operated in a home with an electrostatic air filtration system". Anyway, he stood his ground and I figure that it's his job to look for any way he can to deny a claim. But that brings me to the real problem with the projector: the lack of an air filter on the unit makes excessive internal build up of dust inevitable.