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There was a time when home cinema was the realm of the true enthusiast. I can vividly remember ordering LaserDiscs from the most obscure sources, just so I could watch high-quality movies at home. For me VHS was so appallingly bad that I couldn’t bring myself to view it, and LaserDisc was also the only format that sported Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks.

However, all this changed with the introduction of DVD. DVD brought with it high quality picture and sound at a fraction of the cost (and size) of LaserDiscs. It didn’t take long for the cost of DVD players to drop and for the format to become consumer friendly. And with the anamorphic nature of DVD movies, widescreen TVs have also become the norm in most homes today.

Now, even though widescreen TVs have become almost standard, I still find myself having frustrating conversations with friends and colleagues, trying to explain aspect ratios. Amazingly I still get told by some people that they don’t like widescreen movies because they don’t see as much of the picture because of the black bars. I’ve quite literally been at the point of murder in a couple of cases, so you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t go into too much detail on the subject of aspect ratios here.

Regardless of the general misunderstanding of widescreen aspect ratios, large widescreen TVs are more accessible than ever. However, large screen TVs bring with them the disadvantage of being, well, large. I’ve got a 40in widescreen Toshiba rear projection TV which I bought primarily due to its excellent image quality via the component video input. The down side of this TV is that it takes up a disturbing amount of space in my living room, although not as much as a conventional large screen CRT. I also find that the 40in image isn’t really as large as I’d like either.

So, what I really want is a very large screen TV that takes up little or no space in my living room. Although this may sound like something of a paradox, there is a solution to this dilemma.

Home cinema enthusiasts have been using projectors to create massive screen images for some time now, but it was only a few years ago that projectors with true 16:9 widescreen panels started appearing. Now however, there is no shortage of proper widescreen home cinema projectors and one such device is the Toshiba MT500.

The MT500 sits at the top of Toshiba’s home cinema projector range, and it has just about every base covered. Using DLP technology rather than LCD, the MT500 produces a bright image with a superb contrast ratio of 2,500:1.

DLP or Digital Light Processing is a very different technology to LCD. LCD devices are made up of liquid crystals trapped between two substrates which will twist when subjected to an electrical current. The use of polarising filters then allows the twisted and untwisted states to dictate whether light is transmitted or blocked. A DLP device on the other hand uses something called a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) to transmit light. The DMD is a semiconductor containing over a million tiny mirrors mounted on hinges. Each mirror can tilt either towards the light source or away from it creating on and off states. The mirrors can switch several thousand times a second and the amount of on and off times determines the shade of grey that hits the screen. To create colour, a DLP system will pass the light through a colour wheel before it hits the mirror array, leaving the switching to determine the shade of the pre-selected colour.

Because the light in a DLP system isn’t having to pass through many layers and filters as with LCD, the image produced is generally brighter. DLP is also the favoured system in cinemas that have adopted digital projectors.

The MT500 is a surprisingly small device measuring 308 x 108 x 290 (WxDxH) and weighing only 3.2kg. Dimensions and weight aren’t of paramount importance however since this is not the kind of projector you carry around with you.

The 210W lamp in the MT500 produces a brightness of 700 ANSI lumens and will last for approximately 1,500 hours of viewing.

The lens is protected by a detachable lens cap, that’s thankfully tied to the projector with a cord, making it less likely to go missing during use. Around the lens you’ll find the manual focus ring to ensure a sharp image no matter where the projector is positioned.

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