Toshiba's Wireless Short-Range Projector

Our Last Gadget Standing competition will be taking place next Wednesday, and all the finalists duking out it next week have been announced. There will be plenty of wafer-thin and monster LCD and plasma displays at CES, but newer DLP projectors able to produce a comparable image without taking up much space in the living room are quickly becoming a consumer's cheaper alternative.

One of my picks included the Toshiba TDP-EW25U DLP projector, which I've had the pleasure of checking out during my holiday vacation. I say "pleasure," because after spending time with this particular projector, it will be very hard for me to go back to playing Rock Band or watching movies on a regular screen.

One of the features that really impressed me is the "extreme short projection" capability it has to produce a 60-inch image from a mere 2.4 feet away. During my review, I placed the projector about five feet away from the wall, which produced a massive 120-inch image on the wall. Good thing I had plenty of wall space.

Setup was quick and painless, and the image quality was amazing. The TDP-EW25U DLP projector is extremely bright, thanks to its powerful 2,600 ANSI lumens, and the picture is sharp, due to its 1,280 by 800 pixels of resolution and 2,000:1 contrast ratio. The projector has plenty of connections, including a LAN and USB port, two RGB connections, two video inputs for composite and S-Video, and two components (shared with computer inputs). It also has a built-in speaker, as well as a control panel located on top of the projector with plenty of buttons to correct distortion, zoom in or out, and conduct a few other adjustments. Most of these controls were very easy to understand.

The TDP-EW25U DLP is better suited to corporate customers, educational use, and mobile professionals. For example, the TDP-EW25U DLP is one of the industry's first wireless network projectors that's compatible with Microsoft Vista Ultimate's Meeting Space functionality. Thanks to its wireless functionality, users can share presentation files remotely as well as conduct presentations from anywhere in the room without physically connecting their computer to the projector. To make it even easier, the USB port on the back can be used to deliver PC-free presentations. Just load up your USB drive with your files and leave the computer at home. The projector is extremely quiet and will shut down instantly once disconnected, so it doesn't require any cool-down time.

The TDP-EW25U DLP is available now for $2,369 on Toshiba's site (although you could probably find it for less), which is well worth the price in my book. If you think this is a worthy LGS contender, let us know next week before we choose our Last Gadget Standing champion for 2008.