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Turning to other aspects of the TW5800's pictures, things are much less controversial and generally rather brilliant. Fine detail levels and sharpness with HD sources, for instance, is exemplary, with immaculate edging, a great sense of depth, and effortless rendering of all the lovely textures in clothing, faces, background walls and so on that are HD's trademark.

The picture is also extremely dynamic, achieving much greater extremes of brightness and darkness within the same frame than the TW3800 was able to deliver.

Actually, the darkness mentioned in passing back there is pretty extraordinary. Blacks really look black, with practically no trace of the grey misting effect always witnessed elsewhere to some extent with LCD technology. In fact, I have no hesitation in declaring the black levels produced by the TW5800 to be the deepest and most convincing I've ever seen on any LCD projector - including Panasonic's PT-AE3000.

This fact largely demolishes one of rival DLP technology's biggest traditional advantages over LCD, and in doing so lends more weight to LCD's own traditional advantage of a complete freedom from DLP's common rainbow effect, whereby some people see stripes of red and green colour flickering around the periphery of their vision.

While I'm on the subject of technology-specific issues, I'm happy to report, too, that the impressive clarity of the TW5800's pictures is achieved without a trace (on my 100in screen, at least) of the old chicken wire crosshatch effect that used to be associated with LCD projectors.

Yet more good news concerns the TW5800's colours. These are superbly consistent and effortlessly natural for 99 per cent of the time, even after minimal calibration. They also enjoy immaculate blends, at least with high definition material, and hold on to a fine level of subtlety even during dark scenes, thanks to the projector's groundbreaking (for LCD) black level work.

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