We've been mightily impressed by some of Toshiba's supposedly lower-ranking projectors - so we come to the company's flagship MT8 model with hopes raised high.
The Mt8 looks quite plush in some ways - a bit cheesy in others. The plush bit comes from the silky white finish. The cheesy bit is the rather bog-standard sculpting, which shows all the design imagination of plasterboard. In fact, the more we look at it, the more we feel like we've seen this particular brand of blandness before... ah, yes: the MT8 is a dead ringer for some InFocus Screenplay models. And wouldn't you just know it, it turns out that the Mt8 is more or less a rebadged version of InFocus's old Screenplay 7200.
To some extent, this is no bad thing; the 7200 was one of the finest DLP projectors we'd seen. On the other hand, the key word back there was 'old'; the 7200 has now been replaced in the Screenplay range by a new 7205 model (reviewed elsewhere in this group test), potentially making the Mt8 a man out of time...
In with the new
The MT8's connections pass muster, at any rate. Leading the charge is a DVI jack primed for Sky high-definition and DVI-bearing DVD players, thanks to its HDCP compatibility. There are also two sets of component video inputs for analogue high-def and progressive scan sources, all the usual lower quality video options, plus a standard PC jack and two 12V trigger outputs.
Driving the MT8 is Texas Instruments' HD2 DLP chipset, the main features of which are a fair-to-middling contrast ratio of 1,400:1, HD-friendly native widescreen resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels, and an impressive 1,000 ANSI Lumens of brightness. Also on hand is Faroudja's DCDi processing.
While setting the MT8 up, we were immediately taken by the flexible lens array, especially when it comes to delivering a truly large image from a relatively short throw distance. We also got mileage out of one or two quite unusual setup features, including noise reduction, gamma presets, boosting of the chroma and luma detail levels, and Cross Colour Suppression, which reduces noise by processing the video signal to remove colour information from its luma portion.
