Until recently, an HD Ready DLP video projector would set you back over a couple of grand, and it would probably have come in the shape of Toshiba's impressive TDP-MT700. But that's about to change dramatically thanks to BenQ, as it unleashes the HD Ready PE7700. It's comfortably priced at less than £2K, which is fine - as long as the aggressive price doesn't make an impact in performance terms...

There's nothing cheap about the way the PE7700 looks. The projector is promisingly heavy and sizeable for a sub £2k offering, and looks resplendent in its slick combination of high-gloss white and shiny silver trim. There's some icing on the cake, too, in the form of a sumptuously recessed BenQ logo.

The good first impressions continue with the PE7700's connections, which include an HDMI input, component video connection, a set of five BNCs for PC/RGB use, and the customary S-video and composite video fallbacks. A 12V trigger jack would have been appreciated perhaps - but in reality the only people likely to miss this are custom installers.

Backing up the HDMI/component jacks to win the PE7700 its HD Ready spurs is a native widescreen resolution of 1280 x 720. Other specifications of interest include a claimed contrast ratio of 2,500:1 (the same as that of Toshiba's MT700), claimed brightness of 1100 ANSI Lumens (actually marginally higher than that of the Tosh), HD2 chipset and a six-segment colour wheel.

When it comes to features, perhaps the most intriguing is BenQ's Senseye technology. This proprietary image-processing system divides all source signals into separate brightness (Y) and colour (UV) components before applying four separate enhancement procedures to deliver, so it's claimed, more details in dark areas, richer colours, greater sharpness, and improved motion. Other helpful tweaks found amid the PE7700's nicely designed onscreen menus include noise reduction; a variety of picture presets; separate adjustments for the red, green, blue and yellow colour components; a two-setting black level adjustment; low and full lamp power options; a dust filter (worth having even though the PE7700's optics are housed in a sealed environment); white balance fine-tuning; and picture-in-picture facilities. Many of these can be considered well beyond the call of duty considering the projector's crowd-pleasing price.