Sim2 Domino D35 review

Here's a company whose reputation is hard to separate from both high prices and quality projectors. At £3,000, Sim2's D35 is hardly being given away, but from its substantial and sophisticated appearance you know straight away that it means serious business. Its curvy form is rough textured and available in black or white but it's the connections that first alert you to its credentials.

The socketry includes an HDMI jack, component video, PC D-Sub jack, 12V screen trigger output and even an optical audio output. Under the hood, the really important stuff is found in the form of a Texas Instruments HD2 DarkChip 2 DLP chipset, which is the high quality brains of the unit, however soporific the name.

It offers a resolution of 1,280 x 720 with a decent sounding contrast ratio of 3,200:1. The lamp it uses is a reasonably powerful 150W version while the lens has a long throw ratio of 1.8-2.4:1 that can put out an image of between 50 and 250 inches.

The Alpha Path light engine it uses was designed for the flagship C3X model so we were reasonably confident that image focus and colours would be under the expert control of a stern taskmaster.

This iron picture discipline is also supported by complex video processing designed to deal with motion artefacts and jagged edges - the banes of the DLP world - with various manual adjustments for handling video and graphics sharpness, overscan and vertical image shift.

So what does all this add up to? It's the colours that struck us first, which were displayed with a rare vibrancy and purity. The grand views of the island's valleys and peaks in King Kong were lusciously reproduced, while the blue and reds of the day and night sky were dreamily realistic.

Their accuracy was also confirmed by all the skin tones, whether hairy men or blushing beast. Movements were traced without any more motion than you expected to see. Picture sharpness was also impressive with the water looking crystal-clear on the spray of the crashing waters on the heaving lifeboats fleeing Kong.

It's no surprise, after all this, that black levels were rich and deep adding further to the squeamish horror induced by the giant insects overrunning the expedition. Video noise is practically non-existent as are the other plagues of DLP, and other than a vague hum of running noise, we couldn't reasonably find fault with it.

For us, it's simply the best in the class.