Whatever else Italian projector company Sim2 may be, it's certainly not cheap. To date its ethos has been to deliver the best results possible at any price.

So we approached the Domino D10 with mixed feelings. There's genuine excitement at the prospect of a projector for people who are new to Sim2's products, but we're also concerned about how much of the brand's traditional quality has been sacrificed to hit the low price.

The D10's dull, matt black looks only serve to heighten our concerns, since they lack almost all semblance of the high gloss chic that marks out every other Sim2 model.

Alarm bells continue to ring with the discovery that the D10 uses a Texas Instruments Dark Chip2 DLP system inside. Nothing wrong with that except that it's now been superseded by Dark Chip3 (found on the lower priced InFocus IN78), which offers better response times and contrast performance.

Thankfully, the lightbox is armed with a full application of Texas Instruments' BrilliantColor system.

Designed to produce richer and more authentic colour tones from DLP technology, BrilliantColor can sometimes be found in a software-only form containing just the processing side of things.

But the full version that's installed also employs a colour wheel with extra yellow, cyan and magenta sections alongside the customary red, green and blue.

Not surprisingly for the money, the D10 favours a normal HD Ready 1,280 x 768 pixel count rather than full HD. But the vast majority of its direct competition does pretty much the same thing.

One fly in the D10's specification ointment is its unimpressive claimed contrast ratio of 2,000:1. We'd certainly expect to see a higher figure here if Sim2 had gone for a Dark Chip 3 array; for instance, the InFocus IN78 comes in at 3,500:1. But we're not so worried about comparisons with the sky-high figures quoted by some rival LCD brands, as these only achieve their figures by reducing brightness output during dark scenes, which the D10 does not need to do.

Connections on the unit are good for such an affordable projector, and include 1080p-capable DVI and HDMI sockets, a component video input, a D-Sub jack for PCs, and both USB and RS232 ports for system integration.