Dell M209X Business Projector Review – General Performance 2

Posted on March 27, 2008 By Art Feierman

Dell M209X - Projector Brightness

There’s nothing like a nice, very small projector that packs a lot of punch. In this regard the M209X does extremely well. It claims 2000 lumens and, surprisingly significantly beats that promise. Most projectors usually come up a little short of their claims. The brightest setup we could find is selecting PC mode, with Color Temp on Mid setting. This yielded an impressive 2612 lumens!. Dropping the projector’s lamp into Eco-mode (low power), dropped the brightness almost a perfect 25% to 1956 lumens. The 25% drop should be consistent, for Eco-mode, for any of the settings. Leaving the projector in PC mode, and lamp on full power, testing Low and High color temperature resulted in measurements of 1813 and 1860 lumens respectively.

Movie mode (color temp on Mid), which offers the best color accuracy (especially on reds and yellows), automatically drops lamp power into Eco-mode. This measured 861 lumens. You can, however manually select full lamp power, and doing so measures 1146 lumens. To put that in perspective, most home theater projectors, in their best modes produce between 300 and 700 lumens, and most produce less than 1200 lumens in even their brightest mode.

Other modes at full power (color temp on Mid), resulted in:


SRGB	1612 Lumens
Game	1953 Lumens

Any way you slice it, the Dell M209X is very bright for such a small, and light projector, easily holding its own with many entry level XGA portable projectors weight 5-7 pounds, and having two to four times the physical bulk.

Just think, 10 years or so ago, a typical 17 pound projector typically had only 350 to 500 lumens and was easily eight to ten times the bulk!

Dell M209X Lamp Life and Replacement

This is a big win area for the M209X. While most projectors offer 2000 lumens at full power, and 3000 lumens in Eco-mode, the M209X claims 3000 lumens in full power, and 5000 hours in Eco-mode. This makes it one of the most affordable projectors around, in terms of operational costs.

On using the M209X for Home Theater

OK, it certainly isn’t a match for dedicated home theater projectors in color accuracy, and those susceptable to the Rainbow Effect, will definitely have a problem with the Dell.

On the other hand, colors in Movie mode are pretty good, and skin tones are respectable. As an added bonus, the Dell is brighter than most home theater projectors, even in its relatively less bright Movie mode.

Fan noise, as noted above, in Eco-mode, is typical of many DLP home theater projectors in full power mode, but then, it is also brighter than most of them in full power mode. With the Dell set to Movie, and Lamp on full power, it definitely is a bit noisy, but then you won’t really care if you are watching sports, when you want the most brightness.

All considered, it does a very decent job as a business projector you want to take home to use occasionally, for a little entertainment.