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Some of you might be starting to think at this point that there must be a severe price to pay for all these picture processing hijinks in terms of image delay. After all, no matter how powerful the VP50Pro's processing engine might be, it won't be able to apply all of its improvements to the picture without holding up the video path at least a little.

However, apparently the VP50Pro can deinterlace and upscale a source image while generating a maximum delay of just three frames. What's more, if you find that even this level of delay is mucking up your gaming skills, the unit sports two Gaming modes, one of which takes away the unit's edge-adaptive processing element to bring the delay down to one frame, while the other additionally removes motion-adaptive processing to get the delay down to a claimed sub-1-frame level. With either of these modes in play I was able to enjoy markedly improved PS3 and Xbox 360 pictures on my projector and TV without my gaming performance suffering any notable deterioration. Although even the VP50Pro couldn't actually make me any better…

So, are there any problems with the VP50Pro? Well, occasionally one or two really strongly defined straight lines - such as the lines around the money amount graphics in Deal or No Deal! - can appear with a faint echo streaking across the screen. And I've heard tell of the occasional crash. Though these are apparently nothing a simple reset can't fix, and I didn't experience any such crashes at all myself.

Verdict

The VP50Pro clearly isn't for everyone. For no matter how good it is, you probably won't get £2,250 of benefit from it if you've only got a ‘little' 42in TV. On the other hand, integrating a VP50Pro into a high-end cinema installation makes it look like the biggest bargain going. For if seeing standard definition magically turned into something remarkably akin to high definition and high definition turned into, well, even higher definition on your projector isn't worth £2,250 of any AV nutter's savings, we don't know what is.

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