Sony VPL-HW10

Update: do not buy this machine at the moment! The HW 15, scheduled out in November, will offer all of this and double the contrast, plus Advanced Iris 3. This means you can either wait out a little while and buy what is still an excellent projector at a knock-down last-year's-model price, or go for the slightly bigger brother.

Wow. This projector is fantastic. Very quiet in operation, very easy to use. The menus are comprehensive and fairly intuitive until you start more complicated calibration. But frankly the picture based on settings out of the box looks great, just hit the "Cinema" mode button for a similar effect to "Theatre Mode" on Sony BRAVIA TVs. Zoom, focus and lens shift are easy to use; I would have preferred a little more horizontal leeway (only 25%), but most people will be less lazy than me and go for a ceiling installation thus negating this problem.

The remote is easy to use, comprehensive and backlit. The picture looks better in Eco mode (or am I crazy?) so you should be good for up to 3000 hours of home cinema heaven. Sony also offer very good support. Of all the items in my home cinema set-up, this is the only one where I would not even contemplate for a moment replacing it with something different if it broke down and the model was still available.

Strange that there's no review of the Sony HW15 - I've had one for three months - amazing, is all I can say.

This projector has completely changed the way we watch films in our house - easy to set up, and cinema mode does the job fine. Just watched Watchmen and also The Princess and the Frog - very different films, but superb on to our 82" projector screen.

Extremely quiet and relatively cool. Very good on gaming too - PS3 COD Black Ops shines.