PICTURE QUALITY Given the SX60's impressive performance during setup, I wasn't surprised to see it looking equally good on movies. Watching a scene from the Happy Gilmore HD DVD where Happy (Adam Sandler) impresses a pair of moving guys with his golf ball-thwacking skills, I noted a wide range of green tones in the leafy suburban setting. Grass, shrubs, trees, plants - they all looked perfectly natural and distinct. More vivid tones like those in the orange, red, and purple flowers arrayed in the background also looked natural and balanced, as did the skin tones of Happy and crew.

Moving on to X-Men: The Last Stand on Blu-ray, the Canon's picture displayed rock-solid contrast in a boardroom scene at the Department of Mutant Affairs where the President (Josef Sommer) confers with the beastly, blue-skinned department secretary (Kelsey Grammer). I saw plenty of shadow detail in the bigwigs' dark gray suits, and the lines in their striped shirts and ties looked solid. Although the Blu-ray picture was relatively crisp and clear, its sharpness was several steps below what I've seen from 1080p-rez front projectors, including some "budget" models in this price range. The picture also looked slightly blurry in scenes with camera motion, such as a pan across the face of a building. Still, picture clarity was good enough during static shots that I could make out details in the maps lining the walls of the boardroom in X-Men.

BOTTOM LINE For a model designed for uses other than home theater, the Canon Realis SX60 LCoS front projector does an impressive job of displaying DVDs and HDTV at home. Its greatest strength is its accurate color reproduction - in all the movies I watched, colors looked vivid and natural. Punchy picture brightness and low fan noise also contribute to the Canon's home theater-readiness. That said, its inability to switch easily between standard 4:3 and widescreen image formats makes it a hassle to use with a 16:9 screen. And with several 1080p-rez projectors now selling for around the SX60's $5,000 price, I'm not sure why you'd select it over those options - unless you're a photographer looking to make use of the sRGB or Adobe RGB color space settings. In that case, you'd get an excellent projector for slide shows, and one that also looks really good when watching video.

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