Casio XJ-S400UN Business/Education Projector Review

The Casio XJ-S400UN is part of Casio’s new Superior series, which features the next generation of their mercury-free, hybrid laser and LED light engine. The series was announced in January, and also includes Casio’s new dust-resistant design, enhancing the effectiveness of cooling the light source and power supply, and protecting against dust settling inside the unit, even in dusty environments.

This DLP projector is intended for business and education environments, as are all of Casio’s projectors. It has WUXGA (1920x1200) resolution, and is compact enough to be considered a portable projector, so it can be transferred from conference room to conference room, classroom to classroom. Its 4,000 lumen claim makes it nicely bright, with enough power to combat the ambient light commonly found in K-12 classrooms, conference rooms, boardrooms, retail spaces, and museum exhibitions.

As always, I’ll start this review with an overview of the projector and a look into its highlights, before diving into its special features. Following that, we’ll have a detailed discussion of the hardware. Then, we’ll take a closer look into the projector’s capabilities, discussing picture quality and performance, before wrapping it all up for you and providing some insights into competition and its pros and cons.

The Casio XJ-S400UN is a business and education projector with WUXGA (1920x1200) resolution and DLP technology. As mentioned, it features Casio’s upgraded light engine, which they call their R-Laser & LED Hybrid Light Source. This light engine has a lifespan of up to 20,000 hours, and though that is typical of all Casio projectors and most projectors with laser or LED light engines, it is still quite impressive.

In a typical 180-day school year, 20,000 hours translates to 18 years of use when running the projector for six hours a day. And, with 4K not yet being seen as a necessity in schools or many business applications, the WUXGA resolution will do just fine for most applications, for many years to come.

The 4,000 lumen XJ-S400UN should have no problem combatting some pretty serious ambient light, such as what is seen in many business and education environments. It has plenty of inputs and connectors for such environments as well, and features a 1.70:1 zoom lens, giving the projector quite a lot of placement flexibility.

It has no lamps or filters, which makes this projector virtually maintenance free. Though it has a higher price point than many business and education projectors that feature a lamp-based design – $1,949.99 – the cost will be made up for during the projector’s lifetime. This is due to there being no maintenance cost on replacing the lamp (lamps tend to last from around 3,000 to 8,000 hours), and cost of replacing filters. It’s a pretty plug-and-play, then leave alone forever device.

The XJ-S400UN is set up for command and control via Crestron Roomview, which allows for command and control of a projector fleet, even if the projectors included are of different manufacturer makes. It has both wired and wireless LAN (via an optional wireless dongle), as well as many features geared specifically toward education applications – but we’ll get into that on the next page of this review. For now, let’s take a look at the projector’s highlights.