Projector Reviews

Mitsubishi has been a market leader for some time in the business and professional world, offering a wide variety of LCD and DLP projectors. Regular readers of <I>Stereophile Ultimate AV</I> know Mitsubishi as a major player in rear-projection and plasma and LCD TVs, but probably haven't seen that name on a home-theater projector before.

As the first three-chip DLP projector to pass through my studio, the InFocus ScreenPlay 777 generated more than a little excitement. Apart from its futuristic, streamlined appearance, its size and weight&mdash;not to mention its price&mdash;immediately set it apart from the one-chip designs that have come to dominate the home-theater projection market.

I was mighty impressed by BenQ's PE8700 DLP projector, reviewed in the June 2004 UAV. Now its replacement, the PE8700+, has been launched, and it's no letdown. True, the price has gone up a couple of big ones over the PE8700's closeout price of $6000. But in compensation, the new model gives you the new Texas Instruments 16:9 DMD, the HD2+.

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.

This unassuming little projector surprised me. It's not as attractive as the Epson, it's not as compact as the BenQ, and its price is between them both. Without a doubt, though, this was our winner. Why? Well, in a word: black level. OK, so that's two words.

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+.