Sony VPL-SX125

Sony's VPL-SX125 is designed for use in educational and corporate open plan offices and given its impressive performance, we've no doubt it will excel.

The first thing that hit us about the VPL-SX125 is the brightness it offers. When we first connected the compact projector to our test machine we were impressed with how bright the projections were on our wall. This was despite there being bright ambient light.
 
We were even more impressed when we snooped around the onboard menu system and found that the lamp was running in ‘Standard' mode (2,100 ANSI Lumens), rather than ‘High' (2,500 Lumens). Opting for the latter setting, projections became noticeably brighter. This setting is likely overkill for most scenarios.

It's also not worth the lamp life loss because if you run the lamp in standard, Sony says the lamp is good for 4,500 hours but going to the high setting, you'll get only 3,000 hours.       

The projector's visuals at its native 1,024 x 768 pixels were crisp and clear. This made reading text in presentations, in Word documents or on our desktop a cinch. The VPL-SX125 does a decent job with video as well; colours are natural and thanks to a contrast ratio of 3,800:1 the visuals were reasonably detailed even when dark visuals appeared on-screen.