Projector Reviews

Almost universally, our panel agreed that BenQ's PB6200 was extremely close in performance to our second-place contender. Price ultimately pushed this projector into third place: It's $300 more expensive than the runner-up. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The PE8700 DLP projector from BenQ has to qualify as the surprise product of early 2004. The first surprise is that it's made by a company I'd barely heard of before late last year. But with a claimed 13,000 employees worldwide, BenQ isn't exactly small. Its main corporate headquarters are in Taiwan, where the PE8700 is built.

Digital Light Processing is finally getting the recognition it deserves. It's not as hot a technology as plasma, but people are beginning to realize that it's an appetizing alternative—especially since it offers many of the strengths and few of the weaknesses of other digital display technologies. Texas Instruments is the creator and sole manufacturer of DLP chips, and their latest offering is the HD2+ (or Mustang) chip. But it all started long before the arrival of HD2+.

When Sony announced the development of a new home video projector last spring, the buzz began. Would it be the fabled Grating Light Valve technology, which the company is known to be working on? Would it be LCD, DLP, or LCoS? Would it be something completely new?

Digital Light Processing front projection has a short but interesting history. It began in the late '90s when the first consumer DLP projector was marketed. This new type of display—which uses a tiny, reflective chip called a DMD (digital micromirror device) that contains hundreds of thousands of hinged mirrors (instead of miniature LCD panels)—provided consumers with an early look at all-digital imaging. This primitive effort made big pictures, but it had many picture-quality issues.

Survey a panel of true video experts and ask them which of the many competing technologies, old and new, is capable of producing the very best picture, and the majority—perhaps even all of them—will still answer: "A top-of-the-line, data-grade CRT projector with 9-inch tubes." If asked who makes the best such CRT projector, many of those experts will cite Runco and its DTV-1200 model, though some also will praise Sony's VPH-G90U, the projector I own. The differences between two top-of-the-line 9-inch CRT projectors are modest at best.

During a panel discussion at the recent Home Entertainment 2003 show in San Francisco, a few of the panelists (including me) indicated that, despite all the new flat-screen imaging technologies found in front projectors, rear-projection TVs, and plasma and LCD monitors, our preference was still for images created by CRTs. A manufacturer's representative on the panel retorted that CRTs were fine in their day, but that his company was in the business of providing the nearest thing to a theater experience in the home—and CRTs just don't cut the mustard anymore.