EPSON 450Wi projector "don't impress me much"..

EPSON 450Wi projector “don’t impress me much”..

Date: 2010.03.29 | Category: ICT, Primary School, Primary School ICT, review

Of course I’m at the risk of sounding like Shania Twain but with so much hype and such high expectations for this device I was a bit dissapointed. I found the pen to be too heavy for all day use, it is about 4x the weight of a Promethean pen and at £150 for a replacement pen my eyes did water a little..

When using the board close up the reflected glare from a normal dry wipe board is so extreme that is hurt my head after only a few minutes. The device I used the Projector on was very slow to pick up the driver and in some instances it had to be started manually, I’m not sure if this is an installation error or an error with the software that is shipped with the device.

This projector could save the average classroom over £1000 plus the maintenance cost of the board so it could be a much more cost effective solution. I also found that the projector I was using was incredibly blury in the bottom left corner, the rest of the projected image was fine. See picture below:

*UPDATE: On the projector their is a manual focus just by the lens. This fixes the blurring – This is not well documented by Epson.

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http://www.twitter.com/mattpearson Matthew Pearson

Thanks for a useful review and as you say there is a lot of hype around this device so it is good to see someone testing it in a classroom situation and giving honest feedback.

How did you find the software to use once you had it working? Did it offer the kinds of functionality which teachers want?

On the update I’m guessing that the reason that Sanyo have not documented the manual focus ring is that Epson make the projector
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http://www.mclear.co.uk John McLear

I didn’t review the software yet, mostly because once you have interactivity you can use the Promethean or Smart. I believe most primary teachers will choose to do that. Thanks for your comments.
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Lee Bird

The blurry image can be solved. There is a manual focus on the left hand side of the unit. If you remove the filter you can access this. For some reason in the first units we installed this wasn’t in the manual….

Reference software problem Epson do not do their own software and prefer schools to use their existing software such as Activstudio. Hence saving the schools money.
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Fbocquet

You can use for free open source IWB software Sankore (sankore.org) in english and 15 other languages.
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EPSON 450Wi projector “don’t impress me much”..

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