If you’ve been waiting to go big for your home theatre setup, but have been deterred by the high prices of flatscreen TVs north of 60-inches, you ought to be considering the new breed of home projectors that hit the sweet spot between capabilities and pricing, of which the Epson EH-TW5300 is a fine specimen. It’s fairly compact at less than 30cm wide, which means it can be perched on a centre table or bookshelf without taking up too much space, and the glossy white finish and curved exteriors allow it to blend in well with most tastes and decors.

Setting up the EH-TW5300 is just a matter of plugging in the HDMI source and powering it up, and you get a choice of control via a remote and navigation keys atop the projector. There’s another HDMI port with MHL connectivity for compatible smartphones, a USB port plus VGA and composite inputs if you want to go old school. If you have full-HD content, the projector is happy to play it back in its 1,920x1,080 pixel glory, but what’s more impressive is the 2,200-lumen brightness, which allows you to use the projector with a fair amount of ambient light. During evening/night time use, you can switch to Eco mode which prolongs the lamp life as well. There’s 3D support too, but the powered 3D glasses bump up the price by Rs 6,399 a pop — really not worth it unless you have loads of 3D content already.

At its price, the EH-TW5300 is excellent value for the feature set it provides. Sure, it misses a few minor tricks which are the preserve of high-end semi-pro projectors, such as a lens-shift mechanism which allows for off-center placement. Or for that matter, the built-in speakers could have had some more punch but overall, Epson has turned out a solid projector that’s an asset to any value-driven home theatre setup.
♦ Rating: 8/10
♦ Price: 76,279
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-EpsonEH-TW5300

Mid-range call

The sub-15,000 segment is one of the most hotly contested, and the Yu Yunicorn is the latest to take a stab at it. It does quite a few things right — the brushed metal unibody is well built, the 5.5-inch full-HD screen is sharp and bright, and you get capable hardware with the Helio P10 chip, 4GB of memory and 32GB of storage on board (expandable to 128GB). Longevity on the 4,000mAh battery is well into the day-and-a-half category. Performance on the dated Android Lollipop 5.1.1 is good, and the location-based-discovery feature called Around has become far more refined than previous Yu devices.

What lets the Yunicorn down badly is the camera, which lacks in detail and speed of capture/processing, and low-light pictures suffer particularly badly. In such a competitive market, it takes just one significant flaw for the hordes to flock to the competition, and Yu should sort the camera out if the Yunicorn is to have a fighting chance.
♦ Rating: 7/10
♦ Price: Rs 13,499
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-Yunicorn

A smarter robot

You may not have heard of Anki, but they’ve had great success with their app-controlled Drive racing games, and they’ve leaned on their expertise in artificial intelligence to create Cozmo, a small smart robot. Sure, you can control it with your smartphone, but what makes Cozmo special is its emotion engine, which give the little bot a truckload of personality. When it sleeps, it snores, when it sees danger, like the edge of a table, it emits terrified chirps, and when it sees a familiar face, it brightens up, and it evolves, learns and responds realistically to situations over time!
♦ Price: $179.99
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-AnkiCozmo

Savvy traveller

It might look like an ordinary travelling bag, but the Barracuda Smart bag has a bunch of tricks under its covers, you know, aside from storing your clothes and other essentials. To start with, it has a fold out laptop tray for you to prop your laptop on while you’re waiting at the airport, a built-in 10,000 mAh battery pack to charge your gear, and even the option of adding in location tracking with a proximity sensor that will alert you when the bag is on the luggage carousel near you. A somewhat pricey but very tech-savvy companion for the frequent flyer!
♦ Price: $349
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-BarracudaSmartBag

Safe as houses 

Is your home security setup less smart than you’d like it to be? Consider the D-Link DCS-8200LH HD camera. Aside from its wide 180-degree field of view, it allows you to check the live feed on your smartphone and peer into dark rooms to up to 16 feet. What’s great is that it integrates nicely into D-Link’s mydlink connected home devices and opens the doors to a number of possibilities via its support for the IFTTT system. With IFTTT, you can link triggers (“if this”) with outcomes (“then that”), connecting the camera not just with other smart devices, but with online services, which means, for instance, you can set up a rule which starts camera recording when you leave 
the house.
♦ Price:$139.99
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-DLink180

technocool@kanwar.net; follow me on twitter @2shar