A quick glance down at the scores below would immediately indicate to you that we’ve made some sort of error in selecting something that scored below average performance as a Recommended winner, however we’re extremely confident in this. Our reasoning: While it languishes second-last in performance, it more than makes up for it with features and value, which rockets the Dreamio EMP-TW10 to the third highest scoring projector overall.

First off, while capable of projecting data and video, the Dreamio EMP-TW10 sits more on the home theatre side of the fence. This is why when we ran it through the detailed DisplayMate tests, it couldn’t muster very high scores for data display at all. In fact, it returned the worst scores for 3D playback, desktop clarity and text readability out of the entire 15 projectors, so if you are looking for a boardroom projector, give this one a wide berth.

However, if DVD watching, TV projection and low-res gaming, say from a console, are your things then the Dreamio would suit you nicely. It was right up there with a perfect score for DVD playback, some excellent colour tracking and the ability to project a black black - something that you need for good home cinema. Something you also need from your home projector is silence, and both the Toshiba TPL-S10 and Sony VPL-ES1 share the Dreamio’s ultra-quiet operation. Low noise usually comes at a premium: heat output, but the Dreamio ran much cooler than the Sony and Toshiba, which was probably due to the large ventilation slots on its side.

The Dreamio had native widescreen support, with a top resolution of 852 x 480. It can accept input resolutions up to HDTV quality, but interpolates everything to a very basic resolution. That said, it still looked great when doing its thing.
An added bonus for buyers of this model was that it’s capable of throwing a huge image over a very short distance.