Acer H9500BD Pro Reviews

High quality 2D and 3D video quality and it's great to see lens shift, but the lamp life is a little disappointing

Wow, I really like some things about the Acer, and also have several complaints. While there are some really good strengths, and I really wanted to give the Acer H9500 projector our Hot Product award based on those strengths, had to settle for the still noteworthy, but not as significant, Special Interest award. The H9500BD is basically a home entertainment projector, but it does excel at black level performance for its price, which will appeal to some enthuisasts. Further, the 1.5:1 zoom, combined with lens shift gives it much better placement flexibility than all but one or two other sub-$2000 home theater projectors.

Overall, the Acer H9500BD is a fine projector, but while it's well-rounded, it's just not the best at everything. Its black levels and vibrant color do make for an unforgettable and enjoyable picture. And you'll love watching movies and playing games on it. There's just a ton of competition, but with a street price that's a couple hundred under the $1700 retail it's certainly worth taking a look at.

The Acer H9500BD home entertainment projector delivers 1080p 2D and 3D plus such niceties as lens shift and a 1.5x zoom at a notably low price, but with some minor image quality issues.

The H9500BD is best appreciated as a consumer product rather than something aimed at videophiles. If you have a critical eye and need to calibrate your projectors to within an inch of their lives, you'll see plenty to find fault with, from visible noise to the minor loss of shadow detail to the lack of color settings for 3D mode. You'll probably also be annoyed by having only one user mode to store customizations and having to reset most of the settings in the preset modes -- including frame interpolation, color temperature, and color management settings -- if you bounce back and forth between presets. On the other hand, if you're the sort of consumer who's never thought to tweak the color settings on your HDTV, and were happy with the image quality, you should be perfectly happy with the H9500BD's presets as well. Right out of the box, the image is good enough so you'll probably consider the 2D quality fine, and the 3D quality acceptable.