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So, dear, you want to spend how much on a 'home cinema'?

Three thousand of your Earth dollars. That's a hell of a lot of money for a single component, even one as rarefied as a projector. Okay, you can spend tens of thousands on a beamer if you're so inclined and financially endowed, but as we recently discovered, $1,130 or so gets you a very fine example with full 1080p capability.

Put simply, this Epson needs to be seriously nifty. Luckily, it is. We'll get to the profentory bits momentarily, but the fun starts with the extras. First up is the WirelessHD technology.

The idea is fully wireless transmission of lossless HD video. Physically, it involves a separate adapter that plugs into the wall for power, and the source for the images - in our case a PC. It has just a single HDMI input. It's basically a wireless HDMI interface that's equivalent to a wired HDMI 1.4 connection. The projector itself has an integrated WirelessHD interface.

Now, this is the sort of thing that had us sucking our teeth - premonitions of setup headaches, with craptastic frame rates even if we did manage it - that sort of thing. But no, it's as easy to select as any other video input. You just cycle through the digital and analogue settings, hit the wireless option and band, it works. In fact, the results are indistinguishable form using a wired connection. Impressive. Epson claims it has a working range of 10 meters, and we can confirm that it's definitely good for at least five.

Gimme some 3D

The other feature of broad interest is stereoscopic 3D. Active shutter glasses are the drill here (you get a pair), and again, we had no problems getting things running with Nvidia's 3D Vision platform. The only slight snag was the need to run the equivalent of 24GHz refresh at 1,920 x 1,080. That's dandy for movies, but less than ideal for PC gaming.

But what of the projector itself? Well, it's quite simply the finest of its type have seen. As this is an LCD rather than DLP projector you might thing that's damning it with faint praise, but no - this is a superb device by any metric.

Most impressive is the sheer contrast on offer. The black levels are outrageous for an LCD projector, and the result is preposterous detail in darker game and movie scenes. It's incredibly detailed in bright scenes, too. In fact, it's almost too good.

In fact, this is one of the very few projectors we've been happy to run with the lamp in full power mode. Usually that means compromising black levels, but not here. That's partly thanks to Epson's fast acting active iris tech, but also because it just has some damn fine LCD panels and optics.

There's plenty more to be pleased about, including low noise levels and proper lens shift adjustability, which makes it a lot easier to set up.

Technical analysis

The Epson EH-TW9000W brushed aside our suite of test images with nonchalant ease. Perfect gradients, tons of detail in the black and while scales - you name it, the TW9000W nails it. That translates into the finest image ever seen from an LCD projector, and a genuine contender for top honours overall.

Unfortunately, the one thing it doesn't deliver is rapid response. There's simply too much input lag for a pleasant gaming experience. That's an enormous shame. It's still a great movie machine and a truly lovely projector, however, with a whole bunch of great features including WirelessHD and 3D support.

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