Hitachi PJ-TX200 projector

DLP may be king, but LCD's not dead yet.

If you thought that DLP was the only way to go for a serious home cinema projector, then think again. This LCD model from the boffins at Hitachi can more than hold its own against the big boys, thanks to a few clever tricks.

The dynamic iris is the first of these. It varies the amount of light that it lets through according to how bright the actual picture is, resulting in a massive 7,000:1 contrast ratio. This means the black levels almost approach the lovely dark depths of DLP, giving any low-lit shots, such as those of the dead fat guy's apartment in Seven, exceptional scale and dynamics. The picture is astoundingly sharp, too, making every vein of the bloated corpse disturbingly clear.

Colours, meanwhile, are wonderfully bright and vivid, but always seem natural.- Since this is LCD technology, there's no sign of the common DLP problems of fizzing noise over motion and annoying, flickering colour stripes.

There's also a highly sophisticated lens system which employs four low-dispersion lenses to help tackle LCD's notorious "chicken-wire" effect, where a grid-like structure can become visible in the picture. It works very well, rendering the effect almost unnoticeable. Fan noise is also very low at around 24dB.

As well as wearing sumptuous curves and a gleaming finish, this model also comes with all the vital future-proofing connections: specifically, HDMI and the component video inputs that make it an HD-ready projector.
You can still get slightly better black levels from a DLP model with similar specifications, but you'd have to pay at least £400 more - and that makes this projector a real bargain.