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It doesn't help the sense of audio being displaced from the video that the speakers are hardly the most powerful in the world. And so you find yourself sat there watching a massive image while listening to puny sound coming from the other side of the room in a total AV mismatch.

One solution to all these problems, of course, would be to pipe the sound out to a separate AV receiver and speaker system. Except that we seriously doubt that the sort of person likely to be interested in a clutter-busting TWD10 will have a separates audio system lying around the place.

Plus, of course, getting sound out of the TWD10 into an AV receiver means introducing a cable to the supposedly clutter-free proceedings. And potentially quite a long cable at that, as the majority of AV receivers do not tend to be parked next to a projector.

Probably the best way to marry sound and vision sort-of-together with the TWD10 is to use the headphone socket. But even this is still no substitute in my humble opinion for sound that actually appears to be coming from the same location as the picture. Plus it makes watching a film on the TWD10 a distinctly anti-social activity, rather than the communal one many potential TWD10 owners might want to employ it in.

If your AV demands are really unsophisticated enough that nothing I've said about the TWD10 so far has put you off, then I guess that yes, its combi design could offer a bit of fun when playing console games or watching sporting events, especially with a few mates and a lot of beer in tow.

But even if your tastes really are that unsophisticated, do you really want to spend the best part of £700 on making your unsophisticated dreams a reality? As I started this test I actually felt that the TWD10's £695 asking price looked extremely good value, especially as it includes an 80in screen. But now I'm not so sure.

Philosophical objections over, let's move on to the TWD10's performance-related specifications. The projector part is, thankfully, an HD Ready LCD affair, with 1,280 x 720 pixels of resolution. Its brightness is surprisingly good at 1,200 ANSI Lumens max, too, and there are a selection of thematic picture presets, such a Game and Theatre Black.

However, it's pretty limited looking in other specification areas, with, for instance, no dynamic contrast system on hand to help boost black level response. It's hardly surprising from this that Epson doesn't quote a contrast ratio for the projector on its website, and reckoned it couldn't find such a figure when I asked them directly…

The DVD section, meanwhile, sports Dolby Digital and DTS decoding, and can play DVD VR, SCVD, VCD, CD, DivX, MP3, WMA and JPEG formats as well as vanilla DVDs.

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