Aurea P700

The P700 is the projector we would put in our own living room. Native 1920 x 1080, a red-green-blue LED light source rated for over 20,000 hours, and — unusually for this class — a brightness claim that holds up when somebody measures it.

That matters more than it sounds. Independent testing of this hardware class returns around 650 ANSI lumens against a 700 ANSI claim, a gap of about six percent. Competing projectors in this price bracket routinely claim eight or twelve thousand lumens and measure under two hundred. We would rather quote a smaller number that is true.

The optical engine is sealed. On cheaper projectors the light path is open to the room, and after a year or two you see dust shadows on the image that cannot be cleaned out. This one is closed, which is the single biggest difference in how these machines age.

Autofocus and automatic keystone correction work on both the horizontal and vertical axes, so the projector can sit off to one side of the room and still square its image up. There is a 1.1x zoom, but it barely does anything: treat image size as something you set by moving the projector, and allow between 1.3 and 5 metres of throw.

Two honest limitations. Black levels are crushed — dark scenes lose shadow detail, which is a property of LCD projection at this price and not a fault. And there is no HDR support, so HDR content will be tone-mapped down rather than displayed as intended.