Projector Reviews

When Madrigal Audio Labs decided to get into the video-projector business, it was no surprise that they aimed right for the top. With its Mark Levinson, Proceed, and Revel lines, Madrigal is not exactly known for budget products, and the MP-9 makes an immediate statement that the company is as serious about high-end video as it is about high-end audio. Not so incidentally, the addition of a video line, Madrigal Imaging, now makes Madrigal dealers one-stop shops for state-of-the-art home theater.

The Piano HE-3100 DLP projector is such a bargain, you can add fries and a Coke.

Let's face it. Cheeseburgers, at least to low-income-bracket electronics reviewers, are one of three perfect foods (pizza and beer being the other two). So, I greatly anticipated tasting southwest-U.S.-based fast-food chain Carl's Jr.'s Six-Dollar Burger . . . for $3.95. Supposedly, we can now have the same-quality burger normally found at Chili's or T.G.I. Friday's or wherever, but for less money. It was with much the same anticipation that I looked upon PLUS Corporation's announcement that they would market a $3,000 DLP projector, dubbed the Piano. Since most home-theater-based DLP projectors, like the ones in our recent Face Off (October 2001), cost around $10,000, $3,000 seemed like a pretty tasty deal.

Better than I pixelled it.

The first step in overcoming any problem is admitting that you have one, so I'll admit that I don't normally like LCD projectors. There's no point in hiding the fact—it was bound to come out. Of course, I'm ashamed to admit that I'm prejudiced against an entire class of display devices. This is America, after all, where products should be judged on merit and not the composition of their pixels. But, you know, they're fine for other people. It's just not the kind of projector I'd have in my living room . . . . So, I was fully prepared not to like Sharp's XV-DW100U LCD projector. Sure, it can accept input signals from an analog NTSC tuner all the way up to 720p and 1080i from an outboard DTV tuner. So what if it easily connects to your computer, too? All right, it is amazingly easy to set up. OK, it works as a front or rear, floor or ceiling projector. I'll even give you the fact that it's a blast to watch. But, hey, it's still an LCD projector, remember?

Audio considerations seem to be the top priority of most home-theater enthusiasts. But once you reach a certain plateau of sound quality you begin to take a good look at your video display, and most of us end up wanting a separate projector and screen for that real movie experience. At <I>SGHT</I>, we've reviewed some of the most exotic video-display products on the planet. But when the daydreaming stops, we realize that these projectors are the video equivalents of Ferraris. As much fun as they are to write and (we hope) read about, only a few lucky readers will ever park them in their homes.

We've often said that a projector is only as good as the processor that feeds it. The most expensive projector on the planet won't save your picture from a bad video processor. Until now, most people bought projectors and processors like dim sum: à la carte or piece by piece. With few exceptions, they would buy a projector from one company and a processor from another. Runco is looking to change all that by tailoring their processors to work with specific display devices so that you can get the most out of both.