Some of the most affordable front projectors are coming from the pro divisions of well-known companies. Want to pay around $2,000 for an LCD projector? Consider the Panasonic PT-L300U. It hails from the Presentation Systems Group of the Panasonic Broadcast & Television Systems Company, but don't let that deter you. This projector is fully home-theater-worthy. Judging from the happy-android family pictured on the cover of the instruction manual (as opposed to happy-android executives), that must be intentional.

For such a tiny projector, the new Plus Piano Avanti HE-3200 has an absurdly long name. The HE-3200 is the next step up the Plus line from the Piano HE-3100, which I reviewed in the December 2001 Guide. For an additional $600, you get more features, greater setup flexibility, and maybe even a better picture.

There's an old saying: "Good things come in small packages." In our industry, however, there's often a perceived correlation between the size of an AV component (speakers, amplifiers, plasma TVs) and its level of performance. Here, the working mentality seems to be "the bigger (or pricier), the better."

When a video product is arguably the best of its kind, it's hard to find the right words to describe it without blubbering. "The Next Best Thing to Being There" sounds vaguely familiar. "The Real Thing" might perk up your thirst, but doesn't quite gel. And "Must See TV" is only two-thirds right. With the Reference Imaging CinePro 9x Elite CRT projector and Teranex HDX Cinema MX video processor, we're definitely not in TV-land anymore.

Solid-State Front Projection

Digital projection is finally digital. Yes, we’ve been looking at projected images made of discrete pixels created by digital imaging chips for the last decade or so. But in one essential aspect, digital projection has remained in the analog domain. The lamps that drive light through these projectors and onto our screens have been 100-percent analog. Even when they’re new, the performance of these lamps can adversely affect color fidelity, gamma, and gray-scale tracking. They also determine the overall light output the projector is capable of. As the lamp ages, virtually all of these critical aspects of performance drift somewhat. In the better designs, the change is mostly benign. But there’s no denying that any lamp-driven projector’s light output drops over time, and multi-hundred-dollar lamp replacements every 2,000 hours or so are a fact of life. Until now.

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.