December 9, 2005

Hi folks,

We have just posted the review of the Epson Cinema 550. As you may know, we had a technical problem with the review sample and we needed to sort out how to interpret it and put it into proper context for the review, which required some extra research. We discuss it in the review, so I won't go into it again here. But I will say that the Cinema 550 is a surprisingly strong release for Epson, and for the money it is extremely competitive, showing well against the Panny AE900 and the Sanyo Z4. Epson is positioning itself to take a bigger chunk of home theater market share than it has in the past.

The projectors next up for review are the Hitachi HDPJ52 and the BenQ PE8720. Both of these are getting a lot of attention these days because of their high contrast specs--7000:1 on the LCD-based Hitachi and 10,000:1 on the DLP-based 8720. It will be fascinating to see what these two look like side by side. Stay tuned, we will report it all here as soon as we can.

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