DLP is making up for lost time. Chip supplier Texas Instruments has apparently decided that it has let its LCD rivals have more than enough time grooming the entry-level 1080p market, and has slashed the price of its own comparable chipsets, allowing DLP vendors to begin their counter-assault.

The campaign effectively started with Optoma's £2,000 HD80, and now it's being continued by BenQ with its Full HD W9000 at the same price point - potentially amazing value for a projector with so many pixel-packed bells and whistles.

Build quality can be considered excellent. As well as feeling reassuringly heavy and sporting an uncompromising 'industrial' design that had our resident fashionistas drooling, the W9000 is physically massive, hinting at superior electronics and advanced heat and noise management - it certainly runs quietly. And I can't help feeling that the centrally-mounted lens assembly looks far more high-spec than its rivals.

Pleasingly, adjustments for zoom and focus are electronic, via the remote, with no need to faff about manually with zoom/focus rings. You can even shift the image vertically via the remote, too.

The only serious setup limitation is the zoom ratio, which I feel is a little limited at just 1.15:1. This means the projector isn't especially flexible when it comes to fitting into different room sizes. To give you some idea of whether it gets anywhere near your requirements, BenQ claims a 100in image from 4m away.

Anamorphic is in

Anamorphic projection is rapidly redefining the high-end of the projection market in the US. By electronically squeezing a 2.35:1 widescreen image so that it uses all the pixels in a projector's 16:9 chipset, and then recorrecting the geometry with an outboard anamorphic lens assembly, an improvement in picture clarity of 30 per cent is possible.

BenQ obviously wants the W9000 to grab itself a slice of this anamorphic action. Indeed, it wants to stress its compatibility with Panamorph anamorphic lens technology so much that it even puts a Panamorph logo on the projector itself.

Typically, anamorphic lenses cost as much as the projectors they're connected with, but the W9000 can be used with Panamorph's P380-2 attachment kit, priced at a very modest $500 in the US. Unfortunately this add-on is not currently available in the UK, so we can't pass judgement on its value.

The projector is cutting-edge in other respects too. The W9000 can take a 1080p/24fps video output for judder-free motion from compatible Blu-ray and HD DVD machines.

As for the BenQ's other key specifications, the projector employs a high-spec eight-segment colour wheel, while the proprietary Senseye image processing system automatically adjusts the bright and dark areas of an image separately.

A dynamic iris filters down the light emitted by the projector during dark scenes. This is a familiar trick to boost black level response.

Senseye also contains plenty of noise reduction processing to clean up weak sources, but BenQ is keen to stress that this is applied only very 'intelligently', so that it never goes too far and causes such problems as over-sharpness or loss of clarity.

Other specifications of interest include 3D colour management; 10bit colour processing to render more than a million hues and improve gradations; and a special coating on the colour wheel designed to produce better saturation for blue and reds than you get with a standard sRGB colour space, without sacrificing green.

One key feature I've deliberately left until now - because it gives me a neat link to the W9000's picture performance - is the Faroudja DCDi adaptive de-interlacing. Personally, I consider the Faroudja chipset a bit long in the tooth.