Epson EMP-TW200

While it may look similar to the Epson EMP-TW10H, the EMP-TW200 is elevated into a completely different category due to its performance and price.

At over 5kg and approaching half-a-metre wide, the EMP-TW200 is a cumbersome beast, more suited to permanent installation than portability. Along with features like lens shift (150 percent vertical, 50 percent horizontal) the EMP-TW200 offers remote zoom and focus. This means you could make adjustments to a ceiling-mounted EMP-TW200 without needing a stepladder to reach the lens rings.

It's a WXGA (1280 x 720 pixel) projector, and as you'd expect, provides a much sharper picture than lower end widescreen projectors. Colour was extremely well reproduced, with no particular bias and strong, but pleasantly neutral, tones. Our HDTV 1080i performance tests showed excellent signal rescaling, with a sharp, clean appearance. There was no evidence of over-sharpening on any of our test signals, and only minor artefacts popped up in our composite video tests. At this resolution, the flyscreen effect is only noticeable if you're sitting too close to the screen, but we did spot a very slight amount of vertical banding on flat, bright area--though certainly not enough to be distracting.

The EMP-TW200 has a lower contrast ratio than some models, but we found the 1000:1 Theatre setting provided more than adequate depth in dark conditions. It's also notable that the EMP-TW200 features the newer HDMI digital interface, rather than DVI.

It's unobtrusively quiet in Theatre mode, though it can get a little noisy at full power, plus the lamp is rather expensive to replace, making running costs comparatively high.