NEC MT1035: Projector Lamp Disapproves

The NEC MT1035 is a projector that was targeted to the upper echelons of society; it was kind of a super projector of its day. The retail price for this particular projector was around 15,000 US dollars, making the unit one of the more expensive units NEC has ever released. In fact, it was targeted specifically to large corporations and sold in niche and luxury consumer electronics stores (you know the ones you see commercials for on Saturday afternoons).

The unit is not all that impressive when you look at it with 2005 goggles. And the reason the MT1035 was so expensive in the first place was because it was a pre-millennium wonder. The projector outputs 1300 ANSI Lumens which was unheard of before the year 2000. The MT1035 also uses a 150W UHP projector lamp. These lamps were extremely expensive when they first burst onto the scenes in the late nineties, and they also were the determining factor that made the projector so bright in the first place.

We were able to get a hold of a MT1035 and run it though the gauntlet that is the projector review. We tried viewing WWE’s Monday Night RAW with this projector and we were extremely disappointed. The projector is not at all setup for video feeds. It has no HDTV, S-Video, or any other kind of standard video hookup. We had to finagle a complex system that ended in watching the television feed on component wires.

The resolution was alright, as the unit has a native resolution of 1024x768, but there were some major problems in other areas. The contrast ratio for the MT1035 is only 300:1 which made trying to decipher anything in the dark scenes next to impossible. The screen basically looked like a black wall with gloups and globs floating in and out of perception.

This projector also does not have any keystone correction so we were viewing the program in a sort of trapezoid type shape as opposed to a square.

Overall, testing the NEC MT1035 was kind of a strange experience. This is one of the few projectors that we simply cannot endorse and do not recommend to anyone looking to buy a used projector. The NEC MT1035 is simply too old.