FiftyThree Pencil

Pros Affordable. Beautifully designed hardware. As accurate as more expensive styli.

Cons A little buggy to connect at times. Wide rubbery tip makes it harder to draw accurately. Eraser tip isn't very reliable. Bottom Line The Pencil stylus is inexpensive and great for drawing and sketching, and both Walnut and Graphite flavors look and feel fantastic, but the innovative eraser tip is hit or miss.

By Antonio Villas-Boas

The Pencil by FiftyThree ($59.95 for Black Graphite; $74.95 for Walnut) is the first iPad stylus to look like a carpenter's pencil, and as such, it's absolutely beautiful. The large rubber tip may be a little wide, but it's about as accurate as the Editors' Choice Adonit's Jot Touch. Most styli only have one tip, but the Pencil has an additional one at the top that acts as an eraser. Unfortunately, it isn't reliable enough; that and some connectivity issues mean the Pencil doesn't quite nab our Editors' Choice. But it's still worth a close look, and the bundled free Paper app is quite good as well.

Design and Features
The Pencil works with the third-generation iPad and later, as well as the Retina and non-Retina iPad Mini. I am comfortable in saying that both the Walnut and Black Graphite Pencils are the best looking iPad styli available, and both are a pleasure to hold, as they feel positively premium. Both versions are identical in functions and features, so the difference in pricing is due to the materials. Each Walnut Pencil has a different grain pattern, and FiftyThree's website claims its color will "subtly change with years of use." Lay down your torches and pitchforks, conservationists: the Walnut used for the Pencil is rigorously vetted for sustainability standards.

The rectangular Pencil measures 5.45 by 0.6 by 0.25 inches (HWD), and the Graphite model weighs in at 1.12 ounces, while the Walnut is lighter at 0.8 ounces. The majority of the rounded tip is made of the same rubber material that you find on many styli, like the Pogo Connect, but only the very tip has any flexibility.

Unless you were shown or told, you wouldn't realize you can pull the tip to remove the hardware that makes the Pencil work, including the battery, Bluetooth transmitter, and even the USB connection you plug into a computer or USB power adapter to charge; it's completely seamless. At the top, you'll also find the aforementioned flat rubber tip that functions as an eraser to undo your digital ink or paint.

App and Performance
The Paper app is very well designed and simple to use after you learn the basics from watching the tutorials you'll see the first time you fire up the app. You're not spoiled for choice when it comes to tip options, but the basics are here, including fountain pen, pencil, wide marker, narrow marker, and watercolor brush. Color reproduction is good, and the textures created by the watercolor paint brush are a little thick, but realistic. The pencil is also good, but the fountain pen as well as the wide and narrow markers in Paper look very digitized.

You'll be able to get more textures, utensils, and features in Pencil's compatible apps, which include Procreate and Noteshelf (Squiggle coming soon, and more to come as FiftyThree just released its SDK for developers). Pencil's main competitor, the Jot Touch, is only accessible with Adobe's Sketch and Line apps, but Adonit's website claims compatibility with an extensive list of apps is coming soon. Unfortunately, the digital ruler functionality you find in Adobe's apps hasn't arrived yet to Paper and its other compatible apps. 

Unlike the Adonit Jot Touch or Adobe's Ink stylus (from the Ink and Slide combo, the Pencil can be used as a standard stylus without needing to be turned on, and you can use it as a basic, featureless stylus with most art apps. However, to benefit from Pencil's Erase, Blend, and Palm Rejection features, you'll need to pair it with Paper or its other compatible apps. The Pencil would sometimes have trouble pairing with the Paper app, but at least it offered solutions, like resetting the stylus by pulling the tip to remove the inner hardware, restarting your iPad, or even replacing the tip with the spare you get in the box. Once iOS 8 becomes available this Fall, you'll be able to use a feature called Surface Pressure, which lets you apply the entire surface of the Pencil's tip to draw thicker lines.

Part of what sets the Pencil apart is the Eraser feature; flip it around and you can remove anything on the page. However, the Paper app would quite often confuse the flat rubber tip with my finger. That activated the Blend feature, which smudges and smoothes the digital ink. The app would also sometimes confuse the Eraser tip for the Pencil's pointed tip, too, therefore adding digital ink rather than erasing it.

Palm rejection works by using Bluetooth to distinguish between the Pencil's tip and your palm, and it works better than the Jot Touch's. But it's still not perfect, as an errant mark sometimes appeared where my palm was resting during drawing.

Both the Pencil and the Jot Touch styli are actually quite similar in terms of precision, yet Pencil's wide rubber tip makes it a little harder to gauge exactly where a thin line is being drawn on the iPad's screen compared with the Jot Touch's thin plastic tip. However, the zoom feature in Paper and other digital illustration apps lets you draw very accurately. 

Conclusion
FiftyThree's Pencil is one of the best looking and most comfortable styli we've tested, and if the Eraser feature were more reliable, it would have nabbed our Editors' Choice. Adonit's Jot Touch and Fifty Three's Pencil are equallly precise, but the Pencil's wide rubber tip makes it a little harder to draw accurately at times. Eventually, the Jot Touch and Adobe's Ink and Slide will be compatible with a longer list of apps than the Pencil, but the latter is still a fantastic iPad stylus at a great price.

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Sony Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm F4 ZA OSS

Pros Compact. Very sharp through zoom range. Constant aperture design. Optical stabilization.

Cons Pricey. Noticeable distortion when shooting Raw. Soft edges at 24mm and 70mm. Bottom Line The Sony Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm F4 ZA OSS is an upgrade from a standard zoom, but you'll pay dearly for the performance boost you get with this lens.

By Jim Fisher The Sony Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm F4 ZA OSS ($1,199.99) is a step up from the standard FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS for Sony full-frame mirrorless cameras in terms of zoom range and sharpness, and it maintains an f/4 aperture throughout that range. But its price tag is more than twice that of the standard zoom, and the law of diminishing returns applies to the performance gains you'll get for that price. It's definitely a better lens, but whether or not it's worth the cost is dependent on how important a standard zoom lens is to your style of photography. If you're primarily a prime lens shooter and just want a zoom to supplement for the occasional shot, the 28-70mm can save you some money. But if you opt for this lens you can capture more detailed shots with a slightly wider field of view, as well as images with a shallower depth of field when zoomed in.

The 24-70mm is fairly compact when you consider its zoom range, measuring in at 3.7 by 2.9 inches (HD) and weighing 15.2 ounces. It uses 67mm front filters and includes a reversible lens hood. It does extend a bit when zoomed, but the front element never rotates so using a circular polarizing filter is not a problem. The lens barrel has both a manual zoom ring and manual focus ring, but there are no switches to adjust the focus mode or toggle image stabilization. Instead, you'll have to change those settings via the camera's menu system. The 24-70mm can focus as close as 15.7 inches. Its maximum magnification is 1:5, which doesn't quite give it macro status.

See How We Test Digital Cameras

I used Imatest to check the performance of the lens when paired with the 36-megapixel Sony Alpha 7R. At 24mm f/4 it scores 2,556 lines per picture height on a center-weighted sharpness test. That's much higher than the 1,800 lines we require to call an image sharp, and it exceeds that standard through most of the frame. The outer third is a bit weak, with an average core of just 1,068 lines. Stopping down to f/5.6 improves the overall score to 3,145 lines, and edges sharpen up nicely to 1,613 lines. At f/8 the lens shows its best performance (3,392 lines) and edges are also solid at 1,950 lines. If you shoot in JPG distortion isn't an issue, but there is some very noticeable barrel distortion (4 percent) when shooting in Raw. Lightroom 5.5 includes a profile for this lens, which corrects for distortion with a single click. At its widest 28mm focal length the standard 28-70mm lens scores about 2,125 lines at f/3.5, 2,422 lines at f/5.6, and 3,492 lines at f/8, with similar edge performance to the Vario-Tessar at corresponding f-stops.

At 35mm f/4 the lens is quite sharp at 3,130 lines, with excellent performance up to the edges and minimal barrel distortion (0.8 percent), even when shooting Raw. Stopping down to f/5.6 offers marginal improvement (3,206 lines), and at f/8 it manages 3,407 lines. The FE 28-70mm lens narrows to f/4 at 35mm and isn't nearly as sharp; it manages 2,458 lines at f/4 and 3,000 lines at f/5.6 and f/8, with solid edge performance at each aperture.

At 50mm sharpness drops a bit to 2,853 lines at f/4, but it holds its own up to its edges. There's improvement at f/5.6 (3,173 lines) and f/8 (3,313 lines), but if you're shooting in Raw there's about 1.9 percent pincushion distortion, which causes straight lines to appear to curve inward. The FE 28-70mm narrows to f/4.5 by the time it gets to 50mm and scores 2,770 lines, not that far off from the Vario-Tessar, but it doesn't sharpen up when stopped down. Its edges are a little soft, and they don't sharpen up until you narrow to f/8.

At 70mm the performance dips a bit, especially at the edges of the frame. The center-weighted score is still solid at 2,447 lines, and at 1,444 lines the edges are noticeably sharper than they are at 24mm. Stopping down to f/5.6 improves the overall score to 2,731 lines, but the edges hover around 1,575 lines. At f/8 the lens manages 2,931 lines, with edges that are still shy of 1,600 lines. There's a lot more pincushion distortion, 4.2 percent, here, and the amount of in-camera correction that the 7R is performing on images likely shares part of the blame for the scores near the outer parts of the frame. The 28-70mm shows similar performance here as it did at 50mm, its edges also suffer, hitting just 1,400 lines at f/8. 

This lens is a definite upgrade over the standard 28-70mm kit lens that Sony offers for its full-frame mirrorless system, but I'd like to see more consistent sharpness across the frame at this asking price. If you're a Raw shooter the distortion is fairly easily corrected if you use Lightroom as your workflow application, and it's something you'll want to do as it is severe enough to detract from your images. The edge softness at the wide angle, and to a lesser extent the telephoto extreme, is not atypical for a zoom lens, but there are some zooms that avoid those pitfalls. The Sigma 24-105mm F4 DG OS HSM, which can be mounted on an Alpha mirrorless camera via an expensive Metabones adapter, is one of those, but it's a lot bigger and heavier, especially when you consider the size of the adapter, and using it with an Alpha camera isn't ideal.

The Sony Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* FE 24-70mm F4 ZA OSS is the best native standard zoom for the Alpha 7 family, but it's not quite the equal of lenses available for SLRs that are priced in the same range like the Sigma lens. Sony has made some design compromises in order to keep the size of the Vario-Tessar manageable; some of those compromises are easily fixed via software, but others aren't. The Vario-Tessar is an excellent lens, but it's not quite worthy of being called Editors' Choice. The two Zeiss primes that are available for the Alpha 7 family, the Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 35mm F2.8 ZA and the Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 55mm F1.8 ZA, set the bar very high and walked away with Editors' Choice honors thanks to impeccable image quality. The Vario-Tessar doesn't match their near perfect quality, but it does add image stabilization and a zooming design. If you're primarily a prime lens shooter and don't often reach for a zoom, but want the convenience of one, the less expensive 28-70mm can be seen as an affordable alternative. But if you want to take full advantage of the excellent image sensors in the full-frame Sony Alpha mirrorless family with the convenience that a zoom lens offers, the Vario-Tessar is your best option.

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HP LaserJet Pro MFP M127fw

Pros Prints, scans, faxes, and copies. Automatic document feeder. Ethernet. Wi-Fi. Wireless Direct.

Cons No duplexer (for two-sided printing). Only 150-sheet capacity with no additional paper handling options. Bottom Line The HP LaserJet Pro MFP M127fw monochrome laser can serve nicely either as a personal multifunction printer or as a shared printer for a micro or small office.

By M. David Stone

Much like the Editors' Choice Samsung Multifunction Xpress M2875FW, the HP LaserJet Pro MFP M127fw ($259.99) is small enough to use as a personal monochrome laser multifunction printer (MFP) for light-duty print needs, but also capable enough to serve as a shared printer in a micro or small office. It's not as fast as the Samsung printer or the Canon imageClass MF4770n, but it offers most of the MFP features most micro offices need, and it adds HP's Web apps as a potentially useful extra.

Connection choices for the M127fw are essentially the same as for the Samsung M2875FW, with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wireless Direct, which is HP's equivalent to Wi-Fi Direct. Just like Wi-Fi Direct, it will let you connect to the printer from a Wi-Fi-enabled smartphone, tablet, or laptop. This is particularly useful if you don't have a Wi-Fi access point on your network or you want to connect the printer by USB cable to a single PC, rather than connect it to a network.

Mobile printing features include the ability to print from an iOS or Android smartphone or tablet, as well as from a laptop over Wi-Fi, and print through the cloud, assuming the printer is connected to a network that's connected to the Internet. In addition, you can use front-panel menus to print from a variety of HP Web apps, including printing postage from Stamps.com and printing forms from Biztree.com. However, you can't scan to or fax from your mobile device using the iOS or Android apps, the way you can with the Samsung M2875FW.

Basics and Setup
The M127fw's basic MFP features include the ability to print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, including over a network, plus standalone faxing and copying. For scanning, you can use either the letter-size flatbed or the 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), which can handle up to legal-size pages.

Paper handling for printing is limited to a single 150-sheet tray. There's no manual feed, no duplexer (for two-sided printing), and no upgrade options. The tray is enough for personal or light-duty use in a micro office, but not much more than that. If your print, copy, and incoming fax needs add up to more than about 30 pages per day, adding paper can easily turn into an annoying chore. The Samsung M2875FW does far better on this score, with a 250-sheet capacity, a manual feed, and a duplexer.

Setup is typical for a small monochrome laser. At 12.2 by 16.5 by 14.4 inches (HWD), the M127fw is a little bigger than you may want sitting on your desk, but it's small enough so you shouldn't have any trouble finding room for it nearby. For my tests, I connected it by its Ethernet port, and installed the drivers and other software on a Windows Vista system.

See How We Test Printers

Speed and Output Quality
HP rates the printer at 21 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see for printing a text document or other file with little to no formatting. On our business applications suite, I timed it (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at 8.9ppm. That's enough of a difference between it and the Samsung M2875FW, at 10ppm, that you'll notice it, but it's not dramatic. On the other hand, it's significantly slower than the Canon MF4770n, at 12.3ppm, and also slower than the more directly competitive Canon imageClass MF4880dw, which is Editors' Choice in this class if you need fast speed. The MF4880dw's official speed on our tests is 9.6ppm in its default duplex mode. In unofficial tests in simplex mode, it came in at 12.5ppm, essentially tying the Canon MF4770n.

Output quality for the M127fw is a touch above average overall, thanks to better-than-typical graphics quality. Text is at the low end of a very tight range that includes the vast majority of monochrome laser MFPs, making it easily good enough for almost any business need short of high-quality desktop publishing. Graphics output is top-tier for its category, putting it a step above most of the competition. It's easily good enough for almost any business need, including PowerPoint handouts and the like.

Photo quality, like text, is typical for a monochrome laser MFP. That makes it easily good enough for printing recognizable images from photos on Web pages, but not for anything more demanding than that.

Despite its strong points, the M127fw is outclassed by its competition on traditional MFP features. The Canon MF4880dw and Samsung M2875FW, both Editors' Choice models, will give you better paper handling and faster speed, with the Canon printer stronger on speed and the Samsung model offering a wider range of features.

That said, the HP LaserJet Pro MFP M127fw still offers enough to make it worth considering. Because of its low paper capacity and lack of a duplexer and manual feed, it's a little smaller than either the Canon or Samsung models. That makes it easier to find room for if space is somewhat tight in your office. In addition, its Web apps let you print from a variety of websites using front-panel commands, a feature you won't get with the Canon or Samsung models. If you can benefit from the small size and have only light-duty print needs, it can easily be a good fit.

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Intel 730 Series SSD (SSDSC2BP480G4R5) (480GB)

Pros Robust enough for professional workstations. Offers Intel's data center reliability and performance in a consumer drive. Healthy 5-year warranty.

Cons Expensive. Overclocked configuration doesn't offer clear performance benefit. Bottom Line Intel's reputation for high-quality storage makes the Intel 730 Series SSD enterprise solid-state drive a good choice for professionals who can afford it.

By Joel Hruska

It has been a few years since Intel launched a new suite of solid-state drives (SSDs) in the enthusiast market, but the $449 480GB Intel 730 Series SSD (SSDSC2BP480G4R5) is designed to mark Intel's return with a vengeance. The new SSD leverages the same controllers and NAND hardware that Intel uses for its top-end server parts, with an excellent combination of performance and reliability for professional SSDs.

The 480GB version of the Intel 730 Series contains 1GB of DDR3-1600 and an unusually large pool of storage—528GB rather than the 512GB we'd typically expect. This additional storage is used for overprovisioning, i.e., having additional NAND flash on board that's reserved as replacement memory in case part of the original pool goes bad. All SSDs offer some degree of overprovisioning, but the 730 Series gives a bit more buffer room than most. Like the Crucial m500 (960GB) that we reviewed recently, the Intel 730 Series uses an internal parity scheme to ensure that a NAND failure doesn't completely wipe data off the drive.

All these features are in line with the drive's data center roots, and they're backed up by the number of drive writes per day. Intel estimates that the 730 Series can write a massive 70GB per day, every day, for five years. That works out to 125TB of data. How much is that in practical terms? If you're a gamer or you work with high-definition video, imagine downloading the equivalent of four to five modern games or transferring several hours of high-quality 1080p video back and forth across the drive, every single day, for five years straight. In short, unless your job requires you to work with an extraordinary amount of data copying, you're well-covered here.

Performance
We tested the Intel 730 Series in both single-drive and RAID Level 0 configurations. Intel emphasizes that the drives are intended to be used in high-end professional rigs, so we included those results. RAID Level 0 is a type of storage configuration in which data is striped across two drives at the same time. This lets the computer read from two drives simultaneously and theoretically doubles overall performance.

The Intel 730 Series was tested with an Intel Core i7-4770K processor in a Gigabyte Z87X-D3H motherboard with Windows 7 installed and all relevant patches and updates applied. We've made one change to our normal reporting—in this instance, we're reporting the raw storage performance scores for PCMark 7. Normally, PCMark 7's raw score closely tracks the final score. The difference between the two is that the final score inserts pauses and idle times to simulate user action.

This doesn't matter much if the raw score is 5,500 or less, but it compresses performance as we test higher-end storage solutions. The SanDisk Extreme II 480GB garnered a raw 5,776 and a final 5,373, while the Intel 730 Series in RAID Level 0 scored a 9,847 raw and a 5,576 final. In other words, the gap between the scores is different because PCMark 7's weighted algorithms distort (in certain cases) how various solutions compare against each other.

While we agree that incorporating pauses may help create a more realistic simulation of use, in this case, the impact of such pauses isn't showing the benefits of moving to RAID Level 0. If you're primarily concerned with response time and light workloads, there are no benefits to having a RAID Level 0 configuration compared with a single SSD. The benefits of RAID Level 0 appear in heavy read/write workloads—which is precisely what the raw rate measures more accurately.

We've compared the 730 Series against a larger set of drives than we typically use—the budget-priced (but incredibly fast) Samsung 840 EVO (500GB), the SanDisk Extreme II 480GB, and the high-end enterprise drive, the Toshiba HK3R Series (480GB). The Intel 730 Series most directly competes against the Toshiba HK3R family—but as we'll see, that's not just a question of performance.

What our performance figures show, however, is that while the 730 Series in a RAID Level 0 configuration was much faster than any of the single drives, the 730 Series alone wasn't particularly faster than either the Samsung 840 EVO or the SanDisk Extreme II 480GB. Its performance on our tests tended to match that of the SanDisk SSD overall, but fell back from the Samsung 840 EVO, thanks in no small part to the Samsung drive's use of a small slice of single-layer-cell (SLC) NAND to boost performance. Notably, however, it was also much slower than the Toshiba HK3R, which had a raw score even faster than the Samsung 840 EVO's (7,464).

The Intel 730 Series offers top-tier performance, but at a price some users may not be willing to pay. Ultimately, we're seeing drives divide into two different camps, with some manufacturers pushing ultra-low-cost SSDs with minimum price-per-gigabyte, and other drives holding steady close to the $1-per-gigabyte mark. Intel's drives have never been particularly cheap, and that's still the case here; the Intel 730 Series SSD has a list price of $449 for 480GB of storage. That's significantly more expensive than the Samsung 840 EVO, which costs $259, though it roughly matches the SanDisk Extreme II 480GB's price of $441. It's also much cheaper than the Toshiba, which offers the highest overall single drive performance, but at a price of $648.

Is the Intel 730 Series drive worth the extra money? That's going to depend on how you perceive Intel's reliability record compared with that of other manufacturers. There's some indication that Intel does build its drives to higher tolerances than other companies; an extensive survey of how various drives handled unexpected power failure found that only Intel's SSDs followed best practices for data preservation and successfully recovered from a power drop-out in mid-write.

If you're considering building a professional video editing rig and want to use the SSD in a matched set for RAID Level 0, the Intel 730 Series SSD may be a good option. The extra reliability and a long 5-year warranty fare positives when using RAID Level 0, since that configuration is more prone to data loss in the event of a single drive failure. Part of what our results show is that the major difference between SSDs isn't always in their performance, but in their reliability, redundancy, and life span. Intel's 730 family isn't quite as fast as Toshiba's HK3R series, which is why the Toshiba drive remains our top choice for a professional SSD—but the Intel 730 has the same type of capacitors to protect drive data as the Toshiba SSD, and it's backed up by Intel's data center pedigree. Drives like the Samsung 840 EVO and the SanDisk Extreme II are just as fast, but not necessarily robust enough for professional workstations.

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Epson PowerLite 585W WXGA 3LCD Projector

Pros Ultra-short throw. Bright. WXGA (1,280-by-800) native resolution. Excellent quality for data images. Wall mount included.

Cons No 3D support. Harder than much of the competition to set up on a flat surface below the screen. Bottom Line The Epson PowerLite 585W WXGA 3LCD Projector offers WXGA (1,280-by-800) native resolution and an ultra-short throw that delivers a big, bright, high-quality image from only inches away.

By M. David Stone

As a group, ultra-short-throw projectors like the Epson PowerLite 585W WXGA 3LCD Projector ($1,499) stand out by being able to project a big image from an impressively short distance, making it easy to avoid shadows even in tight spaces. With the 585W for example, I measured a 92-inch (diagonal) image at its native WXGA (1,280-by-800) resolution with the projector 10 inches from the screen. Even better, the 585W offers a level of image quality that's equally impressive for data and better than typical for video. That's easily enough to make it our Editors' Choice for ultra-short-throw WXGA (1,280-by-800) projectors.

One of the advantages the 585W has over much of its competition is that, like the Hitachi CP-AX2503, our Editors' Choice for XGA (1,024-by-768) ultra-short-throw projectors, it's built around three LCD chips rather than a single DLP chip, like the Canon LV-8235 UST.

The three-chip design means that the 585W is guaranteed not to show the rainbow artifacts (flashes of red, green, and blue) that most DLP projectors show, particularly with video. And without rainbow artifacts, video tends to be much more watchable. The design also ensures that white brightness and color brightness are the same—which often isn't true for DLP projectors—so you don't have to worry about differences between the two affecting color quality. (For more on color brightness, see Color Brightness: What It Is, Why It Matters.)

The one disadvantage of the LCD-based design is that, like most LCD data projectors, the 585W doesn't support 3D at all. For most people, this won't be an issue. If you need 3D, however, you should be looking at DLP-based models like the Canon LV-8235 UST or the Ricoh PJ WX4130N, which is our Editors' Choice for lightweight ultra-short-throw projectors.

Basics, Setup, and Throw Distance
The 585W is small and light enough—at 6.1 by 14.4 by 14.8 inches (HWD) and 11 pounds 11 ounces—to keep on a cart or even carry by hand from room to room. However, it's meant primarily for mounting permanently just above the screen. Epson even includes a wall mount in the box, and doesn't sell the projector without one. That said, if you need to put the unit on a desk or table, with the image projecting up to the screen, you can. The only problem you'll run into is that the case isn't designed to stay level if you simply place it on a flat surface. If you want to use it that way,you'll have to prop it up with whatever you have handy.

Whether you use the wall mount or not, setup is otherwise standard fare for an ultra-short-throw projector, with a focus control and no optical zoom. For my tests, I used a 92-inch (diagonal) image at the projector's native 1,280-by-800 resolution. I measured the front of the projector at roughly 10 inches from the screen, and the window that serves as a lens near the back of the projector at 11 inches farther away. According to Epson, you can use the projector for image sizes from 60 to 100 inches, with the window at the back of the projector 13.7 to 23.5 inches from the screen.

Choices for image input on the side panel include two HDMI ports, composite video and S-video ports, and two VGA ports for a computer or component video, one of which can also serve as a monitor-out port. There's also a USB Type A connector for a document camera or for reading files directly from a USB memory key, a USB Type B port for direct USB display complete with audio and for giving mouse commands from the projector's remote, and a LAN port for sending images and audio, as well as controlling the projector, over a network.

Finally, you can get an optional Wi-Fi dongle ($99), which will let you connect to a network by Wi-Fi to send images and audio to the projector. You can also connect directly to the projector from iOS and Android devices to send images only.

Brightness, Image Quality, and Audio
Epson rates the 585W at 3,300 lumens. According to recommendations from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and assuming a 1.0 gain screen, that makes the projector bright enough for roughly a 220- to 295-inch (diagonal) image size in theater-dark lighting. For moderate ambient light, it's bright enough for a roughly 145-inch image. For smaller screen sizes you can switch to Eco mode, one of the lower brightness preset modes, or both.

See How We Test Projectors

Image quality is a strong point, particularly for data images. The 585W sailed through our standard set of DisplayMate tests without any serious problems. Color balance was good, with suitably neutral grays at all levels from black to white in all but the brightest preset mode, and colors were well-saturated, vibrant, and eye-catching in all modes. The projector also held detail well, with white text on black crisp and readable at 9 points, and black text on white easily readable at 7.5 points.

Video quality was better than many data projectors can manage. Colors were a little oversaturated using some preset modes and washed out in others, but still within an acceptable range, as long as you're not too much of a perfectionist. The image is no match for what you'd see with a typical home-theater projector, but it's at least watchable for long sessions.

The audio system also counts as a plus, with the 16-watt mono speaker offering good sound quality along with enough volume to fill a midsize to large room. You can also plug an external system into the stereo audio output

If you need a WXGA ultra-short-throw projector that you can carry around easily, you should be looking at the Editors' Choice Ricoh PJ WX4130N. Similarly, if you need 3D, you'll want to focus on a DLP-based projector like the Ricoh model or the Canon LV-8235 UST. For the more common need of a projector for permanent installation and for 2D only, however, the Epson PowerLite 585W WXGA 3LCD Projector's combination of brightness, high-quality data images, and watchable video makes it the model to beat, and our Editors' Choice for a WXGA ultra-short-throw projector.

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