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Crucially, though, the IN83's black levels aren't just deep. They're also incredibly natural, which is to say they contain huge amounts of shadow detail (a happy side effect too, no doubt, of the image's extreme brightness), and look totally believable in tone.

Also very believable in tone is the entire - vast - spectrum of the projector's colour palette. In fact, the IN83's colours are so believable that the curiously coloured aliens in Men In Black actually look as credible as the humans!

With ostensibly the same processing engine and setting arrangements as the IN82, I can only assume that the marginal extra naturalism of the IN83's colours is down to the IN83's combination of enhanced black level and a tad more brightness.

More IN83 goodness concerns the lack of noise in its pictures. There's no trace of either the motion blur or motion dithering artefacts once common to DLP technology, and dark areas also remain largely free of any green or grey dot noise.

This lack of noise allows you to fully appreciate the immense amount of fine detail in the IN83's pictures. Every last pixel of the excellent Men In Black Blu-ray transfer is immaculately rendered without a trace of noise, building yet further on the terrific sense of image depth and purity already developed so successfully by the DC4 black level response.

One last significant plus concerns the IN83's handling of standard definition, which is shown with impressive definition and surprisingly little nasty scaling or source noise.

However, even a projector as dazzling as the IN83 doesn't come without its faults. For starters, I wasn't impressed by the BrilliantColor feature at all. Activating this does make colours look more vivid, but it also has a nasty habit of making the projector emphasise noise in the picture, be it grain in an HD source or MPEG noise in a standard definition one.

Another issue you may have to work round is the projector's operating noise volume. Its fan and colour wheel can be quite intrusive during quiet scenes if you've got the projector sat anywhere near your viewing position, so I'd suggest you try and place it as far behind you as possible, or try and get it boxed into a piece of sound-dampening furniture.

Finally, even its use of a seven-segment colour wheel can't completely free the IN83 from DLP's rainbow effect, where stripes of red, green and blue flash over particularly bright picture elements, such as Men In Black's opening white-on-black credits. But before you get too alarmed by this, the flashes of rainbowing are not only rare, but also so short-lived as to be almost subliminal.

Verdict

The IN83 ensures that the new DarkChip 4 system not only lives up to our sky-high expectations, but that it does so at a far lower price than we'd ever have thought possible

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