Sony's new VPL-VW100 projector has caught us rather on the hop. For while we have come across its ground-breaking new 'SXRD' technology before, it was on a crazily high-end machine costing upwards of £20k. So the last thing we expected was another Sony SXRD projector to appear mere months later costing an astounding £13,000 less. But hey, we're not complaining.

If you haven't heard of SXRD before, it's an exclusive-to-Sony system that rather frighteningly stands for Silicon X-Tal Reflective Display. It's actually based on the Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) approach already seen on projectors from Canon and JVC.But Sony reckons its extensive refinements to the LCOS system justify giving its technology a new name - and looking at the SXRD specs, it's hard to disagree.

For instance, the whole chipset driving system has been completely redesigned, while the SXRD chipset itself has been constructed using a totally new Silicon Wafer Process Technology, to increase its efficiency and reduce its dimensions. Add in a new liquid crystal device design, and you're looking at a core imaging device for the VPL-VW100 that delivers more than twice the pixel density of normal LCD-based chipsets, and the smallest interpixel spacing in the world. So you shouldn't see any visible panel structure in the final image, no matter how big your screen.

SXRD also tackles LCOS's poor black level issues, by using a newly developed Vertically Aligned Liquid Crystal material. This helps the projector boast better driving voltages and optical properties, resulting in higher contrast levels.

Finally the sheer minuteness of the SXRD chipset and the efficiency of its drivers means that the technology works with a response time of just 2.5 milliseconds, avoiding motion blur or judder.

So much for the tech. The VW100 projector itself is a large but pretty affair, thanks to its glossy white finish, tastefully arched upper edge, and rounded corners.

Connectivity includes HDMI and DVI jacks for digital video, component video inputs, a standard PC interface, a network jack for allowing PC control, and a 12V trigger jack for, say, kickstarting a hydraulic screen.

Closer investigation reveals the HDMI port to be rather special, too, in that it's one of the first in the UK able to handle that buzzword format du jour, 1080p. Most HD sources now only deliver 720 lines of data progressively (720p) or 1,080 lines interlaced (1080i), but 1080p's 1,080 progressive lines of image data allegedly take high definition to a new level. We'll be using 1080p upscaling from Marantz's new, highend DV9600 DVD player to put these claims to the test later...

To further boost its HD Ready credentials, the VW100 claims a hefty native pixel resolution of 1,920 x 1,080. Also noteworthy is a phenomenal claimed contrast ratio of 15,000:1 - achieved with the help of an automatic iris system that continually adjusts the amount of light let through the lens depending on the brightness levels of the source image.

The VW100's onscreen menus, meanwhile, boast endless subtle user tweaks for the picture - far more than we can cover here, in fact. But fear not; we assure you that while it's almost infinitely flexible, the VW100 is actually unusually easy to get up and running. And you don't need to tinker with very many settings at all - beyond, perhaps, the auto iris - to be faced with as good a picture as we've ever seen from a single-chip digital projection technology.