The question is, does this high-spec monster do enough to justify its £7,000 price tag and challenge its premium rivals?

The Sony VPL-VW200 gets off to a fine start aesthetically, at least.

For although extremely large and heavy, it wears its bulk with elegance, thanks to the quality of its high-gloss blue top cover, metallic side panels and gorgeous 'stretched diamond' shape.

Limited connections

Connectivity, though, could be better.

The Projector flaunts only two HDMIs (Panasonic's PT-AE2000E LCD projector provides three, and that costs just £2,000) and there's only one set of component video jacks alongside the expected S-video, composite video and D-Sub PC options.

The HDMI ports are both DeepColor v1.3 compliant. Helpfully there's a 12V trigger output for integration with an electric screen (power up the PJ and the screen descends from the ceiling, you know the drill), an RS-232 input for hardwired remote control, and an Ethernet port for linking the projector into a digital network (that might be useful at some point, I guess...).

Powerful lamp

Beating away at the VW200's heart is a Full HD SXRD chipset, now able to respond quickly enough to handle the double-speed image processing that's key to Sony's MotionFlow technology.

MotionFlow adds extra frames of image data in an effort to make movement across the screen look super-fluid and sharp.

Illumination is courtesy of a 400W Xenon lamp. This is significant: its exceptional power should allow the projector to drive much bigger screen sizes than many of its rivals - including JVC's in-many-ways-similar HD100; and it also helps the projector resolve a wider colour palette than projectors that use standard lamps.

The Xenon lamp itself though is an expensive component - a search online at the time of writing found just under £600 to be the best price. Ouch.

Sony's Dark Insertion system

Looking for further features of the VW200 reveals that Sony has been very busy since the launch of the VW200's predecessor, the VW100.

This PJ boasts Sony's 24p True Cinema system for 'purer' playback of Blu-ray's 1080p/24fps format. Also noteworthy is Dark Insertion, a 'sub-element' of the MotionFlow system.

Three modes of the Dark Insertion system are included in the onscreen menus: one simply inserts extra black frames between the real image frames; one alternates between extreme bright and dark gamma settings for the 'real' and 'created' images; and one alternates between slightly different bright and dark gamma settings.

Alternating the gamma in this way reduces further the smearing and motion blur caused by the 'hold effect' inherent to SXRD, D-ILA and LCD technologies.

Improved contrast ratio

The company has also made changes to the optical system and dynamic iris functionality in an attempt to boost contrast.

Sony claims that the VW200 can achieve a ratio of 35,000:1 by reducing the amount of light the projector emits when showing dark scenes.

The downside to this is distracting jumps in brightness. For instance, on the Blu-ray of The Prestige, as Hugh Jackman chats with David Bowie on a veranda, whenever the camera cuts from the relatively dark shot of Jackman to the lighter shot of Bowie, it's possible to see the image brightness shifting through a number of gears.

Last but not least in Sony's video processing techlist is Bravia Engine Pro, a chipshop of 'proprietary algorithms' designed to improve a variety of different picture elements, including noise reduction, colours, scaling and fine detailing.

Technophobes feeling drained by this techno-waffle can relax. Despite its complexity and sophistication, the VW200 is surprisingly easy to set up and use - thanks to a combination of a superb remote control and clear onscreen menus.