Acer H6500 Pro Reviews

Overall, the performance of the H6500 seems very reasonable for its price. Up until now, however, there hasn't been a good place to talk about the "Elephant in the Room". In this case I'm talking about the problem this Acer has with holding on to the signal. Now in my setup, I admit, I never lost the movie content, or HDTV content when I was just sitting around watching. That's a good thing. But, once I start playing with features and menus, all bets are off. With a number of projectors one time you expect to lose the picture for a second or two is when changing some modes. Actually the projector hasn't lost the signal, but the projector shuts down the image while implementing the different mode. With the H6500, the tendency is to lose the signal completely. A blue screen (if that's how you have the background set) appears with a signal processing message. After a few seconds the picture comes back. That can happen two or three times just trying to scroll through the menu to the mode you want! The problem is the Acer loses the signal a lot, even, often when making minor changes on the menus. And in addition, it often knocked me right out of the menus when the picture came back, wasting more time.

If you're comparing it to other models on the market, the H6500 beats the BenQ W1200 in cost of entry, plus it seemed a tad sharper to us. Now if you put this up against the Epson Home Cinema 8350, the Epson has slightly better black levels and a lot more flexibility for installation and video processing, but it also costs about 50% more. Run the numbers and features and we think the Acer H6500 DLP has serious price and quality appeal. At under $900 it's easy to recommend if you know what you need - and more importantly - what you don't.

The 1080p Acer H6500 projector can be the starting point for an inexpensive home theater, but it lacks 3D support, and is best understood as a strictly entry-level choice.

The Acer H6500 is not fancy. It won't revolutionize your home theater. it doesn't have any of this year's popular features. What it does have is solid 1080p performance, good color, and plenty of lumens at a price tag that's difficult to believe. At $899, the H6500 is the perfect 1080p projector for games, sports, television, and other non-theater applications that nonetheless require better performance than one can get from a business 1080p machine. In a perfect world, we'd be shooting out the H6500 against BenQ's W1200, or Optoma's venerable HD20, both of which are excellent 1080p machines around this price range. However, we don't have either of those units in house. Going from memory, the H6500 is the brightest of the three, while the HD20 has the best color out of the box and the W1200 appears more balanced and natural while also rivaling the high brightness of the H6500. The H6500 has the best black level of the bunch. The HD20 is available for about the same price as the H6500, which more or less consigns the H6500 to living room and video game use since the HD20 is a superior home theater projector. Likewise, if you have a little bit of extra money to spend, the W1200 offers superior color with the same brightness as the H6500. However, by combining high brightness and low cost, the H6500 carves a niche for itself in the low-cost 1080p market which no other current projector can match.