Ah, Norway. Home of fjords, picturesque mountain ranges, Winter Olympians, moose and, if Norwegian outfit ProjectionDesign is to be believed, home cinema projectors. The evidence proffered to back this brave claim up is its preposterously monikered Action! Model One Mk III: a projector that's as uncompromising in its specification as it is cheeky in its design.

Why cheeky? Well, just look at it. This is supposed to be a premium grade projector. It costs £5,000, for heaven's sake - yet it's tiny (about the size of an Oxford Dictionary); sexy (there are curves on top of curves, plus a lovely racing car-esque vent system down the side); and almost preposterously chic with its glossy, rich Pearl White finish. And as if that wasn't enough, you can also get the projector in Maranello Blue, or even a colour of your own choosing if Projection Design can manage it.

As you'd expect of a £5,000 projector, the Mk III's connections are fully futureproofed. Which is to say they include component video input (two sets, as it happens) and an HDCP-capable DVI jack. Other bits and bobs of interest comprise a PC jack, a USB port, and a couple of 12V trigger jacks.

Texas is my home

It's when we get to the Model One Mk III's inner specifications, though, that we really get to the meat of why it's a far more hardcore home cinema machine than it at first appears: Texas Instruments' new state-of-the-art DLP chipset, the DarkChip 3.

Improvements apparently afforded by DC3 include better colour control, muchenhanced contrast (around 25 per cent up on DC2), and even less evidence than before of visible pixel structure. On the evidence I've seen of the DC3 in action so far - see our recent reviews of the Marantz VP-12S4 and Sim2 HT300E elsewhere in this issue - in the right hands it really is capable of delivering on all of its promises.

Other specifications worth noting are the superb quoted contrast ratio of 4000:1, brightness of up to 1000 Lumens, an HD-friendly native resolution of 1280 x 720 (fulfilling the projector's HD Ready requirements), and a 7 segment colour wheel that should hopefully reduce artefacting over motion and even, touch wood, DLP's Achilles heel, the dread 'rainbow effect'.

Despite its obvious internal sophistication, though, the Model One Mk III goes out of its way not to stressout technophobes. Its onscreen menus are as approachable as its design, providing plenty of flexibility without being intimidating. Options available include a contrast 'enhancer', a black level adjustment, a series of gamma presets, digital noise reduction, colour temperature presets, and both horizontal and vertical keystone adjustment.

The only downside to the Mk III's operating system is its remote control, which doesn't have a backlight, and relies far too heavily on a horribly fiddly tracker ball-style menu navigator.

The third dimension

However, I quickly forgot about any sourness raised by the remote, though, when I clapped eyes on the Mk III's exceptional pictures. Particularly striking - and this is becoming almost a ProjectionDesign trademark - is the sheer scale of the image. Thanks to a variety of key picture strengths, the Mk III's image has a phenomenal amount of depth, delivering exactly the sort of almost three-dimensional sense of space usually only experienced with high quality celluloid projection.