First impressions of the BenQ MP611 are favourable. It has a smart, shiny casing that is dark blue in colour, while the nine control buttons on the top of the casing come in a variety of shapes and sizes and certainly catch the eye. It's reasonably small at 278 x 220 x 94mm and is easily portable at 1.3kg.

Moving to the rear, the ports and connectors are a bit limited. There are Composite and S-Video inputs, as well as analogue VGA input and output, but you don't get a digital DVI input. That's pretty basic but BenQ doesn't even give you the full range of cables and you only get a VGA cable and mains power cord in the package.

When you turn the power on, BenQ delivers a nasty start-up tune and it repeats this treat when you shut the projector down. We've seen other projectors that use a beep or short tone to let you know the power is on but BenQ has taken this to a whole new level of foulness.

This SVGA projector has a native resolution of 800 x 600 which is the bare minimum that you need if you're running off a Windows XP laptop and frankly the resolution is too low if you have Windows Vista.

The brightness rating of 2,400 lumens is quite conventional, however you can find a replacement bulb for this model at £175 and that's surprisingly cheap. When you consider that the bulb has a life of 3,000 hours in standard mode or 4,000 hours on Eco, compared to the 2,000 of many projectors, you can easily calculate that the MP611 is a cheap projector to run.

It's also very quiet. The quoted noise figures are 28dB in normal use or 24dB in Eco and we have no problem believing them. Some projectors have a minimal amount of baffling inside the casing and shoot a jet of super-heated air out of the exhaust vent but the BenQ projector merely wafts warm air out of the right-hand side.

The bad news is that we were unimpressed by the picture. We found that the Picture Mode preset was the only one that looked half-way decent, although the colours were rather harsh. As is often the case with DLP projectors we had to turn the brightness and contrast settings down to avoid having an image that was over-bright and unpleasant.

Added to that, we didn't much like the zoom and focus controls as the action was rough and felt distinctly built down to a price.

The BenQ MP611 has a decent enough specification for a DLP SVGA projector, but the price is too steep and we didn't think much of the picture, which tended to be bright and harsh on the eye.