It depends on how you want to use it. With good lighting conditions it totally is, and this matches the way in which I use our beamer quite well (during the day there's no time anyways). If you want something that works during the day and rolling down blinds is too annoying for you, then yes, it's not the best choice. But beamers have become much better than 5-10y ago for a given price. DLP technology has become affordable for high resolutions and its rainbow effect has been treated quite effectively, giving you very sharp images. Strong light bulbs are also much more prevalent. Yes you gotta replace them, but I'm anticipating many years until I run out of their 1000+ hours of lifetime, and 150 bucks or so every couple of years seems quite fine for me, more realistically it's probably going to be a new device every 5-10 years like with TVs.