While undoubted value for money, I found Planar's first wave of UK projectors - the extremely affordable PD7010 and PD7060 - a little more 'downmarket' than expected.

With the PD8150, though, the company has raised the performance bar. This is reflected in the unit's price: at £4,400 it's roughly four times as expensive as the previous Planar PJs mentioned.

It's also reflected in the PD8150's design, which is considerably heavier and larger than the earlier models.

Distinctive styling

A high-gloss black finish and unusual near-circular shape ensure the extra bulk is worn well, though, and the design is also practical - Planar maintains that it limits stray light output.

Oversized fans and a colour wheel 'sleeve' are employed to reduce operating noise, too.

Video connections are pretty much as I'd expect for a projector at the PD8150's price point, and include twin v1.3 HDMIs, two component video inputs (one phono, one BNC), a 15-pin D-Sub for PC hookup, and S-video and composite fallbacks.

Three other connections, meanwhile, point to the PD8150's custom installation ambitions: 12V trigger, an IR jack, and an RS-232 port to help integrate the projector into a wider AV system.

Full HD projector

The PD8150 is a single-chip, Full HD DLP projector. This basic spec can now be found elsewhere for much less than £4,400, so I really need to find out just how - or if - the PD8150 justifies its extra cost.

A good place to start is its trio of image boosting processes: Texas Instruments' DynamicBlack and BrilliantColor systems, and Unishape Lamp technology.

The first of these is the most significant, since it claims to boost contrast levels by a factor of three, by analysing the image frame-by-frame for its brightness content, and then expanding the image's brightness range to meet that of the DMD.

Finally, an adjustable aperture that can be closed to any of 200 possible positions is used to ensure that the final peak brightness matches the original (as in, pre-expanded) image.

The net result of this is that even though light is being blocked by the aperture to boost black levels, the apparent brightness of the image doesn't appear to change and dithering artefacts are reduced.

BrilliantColor benefits

BrilliantColor tweaks the balance of grey levels and secondary colours to make the image look brighter and contrasty, and skin tones look more natural.

Obviously this means the picture isn't necessarily as clinically accurate as it is without BrilliantColor applied, but my experience suggests it can improve the look of some kinds of material.

That said, I also think that in use, BrilliantColor can slightly emphasise the noise in relatively low-quality sources.

The final image-boosting process, Unishape Lamp technology, adjusts the lamp brightness for each segment of the DLP colour wheel, claiming to deliver a more natural (for video) colour palette without compromising saturation, and reducing DLP's common 'rainbow effect' artefact.

Limited flexibility

Despite being positioned as a 'custom install' grade projector, the PD8150's setup flexibility is varied.

For instance, it comes with a thread for adding an optional filter so you can optimise the image's brightness in small rooms, and there are 11 built-in test patterns.

However, there's no electronic keystone correction, so the PJ will be intolerant of pretty much anything other than perfect square-on positioning to screen. There's also no remote control of focus or zoom.

However, Planar stresses that with vertical and horizontal lens shift, and independent focus and zoom, perfect optimisation will be achieved at the time of setup by your installer.