The data projector that goes on and on: Casio XJ-V110W

A member of Casio’s Core series of budget-friendly business projectors, the XJ-V110W uses a non-traditional laser and LED light source. Versus a conventional mercury lamp, this hybrid light source has several advantages, chief among them being a very long 20,000-hour lifespan. Coupled with a dust-resistant design and the fact there’s literally no filter to replace, it seems to hit home with those looking for a low maintenance projector.

byNg Chong Seng March 2017

A member of Casio’s Core series of budget-friendly business projectors, the XJ-V110W uses a non-traditional laser and LED light source. Versus a conventional mercury lamp, this hybrid light source has several advantages, chief among them being a very long 20,000-hour lifespan. Coupled with a dust-resistant design and the fact there’s literally no filter to replace, it seems to hit home with those looking for a low maintenance projector.

Under the hood, the XJ-V110W uses a single 0.65-inch DLP chip with a native resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels. It goes up to 3,500 ANSI lumens in brightness and has a pretty generous 1.5x zoom lens. Both zooming and focusing have to be done by hand, which is par for the course for entry-level projectors. A single HDMI connection is found on the back, along with D-Sub for legacy devices and 3.5mm audio I/Os.

There’s no native wired or wireless networking support on the XJ-V110W however, so if you want to project wirelessly from mobile devices, you’ve to turn to third-party add-ons, such as EZCast’s Wi-Fi display dongles. Lack of in-built Wi-Fi aside, you also won’t find niceties like a USB port for sans PC image playback using a flash drive.

Getting the XJ-V110W up and running is a simple affair. It takes about six seconds to reach a full and stable brightness; and if you need to move it quickly from one room to another, just press the power button again, pull the cord and go.

Picture quality-wise, the XJ-V110W is capable of very sharp text - I could read all the way down to 6 points on a 60-inch screen with the projector placed about 1.7 meters away. Light output is high for a DLP projector, plus colors are for the most part vibrant and pleasing. If I looked hard enough, I could still see rainbow artifacts—unsurprising for a single-chip DLP projector—but most people probably won’t notice it. My other gripe is that the projector has no built-in speaker. Along with the lack of a monitor output, the usefulness of the XJ-V110W in a classroom setting and for video playback is diminished. If you project mostly static images like Office documents, I’ve no qualms recommending it.