Slightly over budget and over-specified to fit within last month’s budget projector roundup, the Casio XJ-360 is a very compact and very capable projector that may just be worth those extra dollars.

The Optoma H27 is one of the best home theatre projectors we looked at here.

Priced a little below the popular $2500 ceiling, the NEC HT410G is a very funky looking home theatre projector.

The brand new HC100 from Mitsubishi Electric is a more traditional looking home theatre projector with a centremounted lens, and curved lines.

The utilitarian looking InFocus ScreenPlay 4805 is a very capable home theatre projector, provided that you’re looking for a projector mainly for home theatre use.

The PE5120 from BenQ is a native widescreen projector, and while it’s happiest displaying DVDs and home theatre inputs it also performed well with desktop and text projection.

There are many things that are given the 'instant' moniker, but usually products from the IT world are not among their number. Slow PC boot times (whatever happened to instant-on PCs?) and a whole mess of configurations takes the instant gratification out of most technology...

Panasonic's new business projector, the PT-LB10NTE is a stunning little unit for its price and size. It features a bright 2000 ANSI lumens rating - powerful enough that the projection is clearly legible even with the fluorescent boardroom lights on, and a wide 500:1 contrast ratio.

The second Panasonic submitted, the PT-LC76E rated higher than its sister model -- with even better performance for both office and home real world tests - and came only second to the Hitachi CPS210 overall.

A quick glance down at the scores below would immediately indicate to you that we’ve made some sort of error in selecting something that scored below average performance as a Recommended winner, however we’re extremely confident in this.

One of the few projectors to edge up to the $5,000 cut-off mark for this Labs, the Panasonic PT-AE300E proved to be bit of a powerhouse in our test suite.

When you group a bunch of products together and sort them out with scores, something, somehow, always ends up the average. In the case of the vp6110 this means average across the board.

While not the most stunning of projectors when displaying either video or data, the Mitsubishi SL2U is certainly a more than capable projector for both the boardroom and the lounge room.

As a business projector, the EP-731 is quite good. While resting just below average in our tests, it showed some strength in data projection, as well as a reasonably high score for DVD playback.

Philips’ bCool projector was very much that - cool. Only the Proxima DP1000X was smaller, but the bCool definitely tackled miniaturisation with more panache.

The Plus U4-112 suffered from some persistent problems when we tested it, including some noticeable moire and thick banding that showed with highly detailed test patterns.

The Proxima DP1000X was so small, that it’s hard to imagine much of an image coming out of it, yet it threw out a decent 1,024 x 768, 6.8m image from up to 10m away.

Sony’s VPL-ES1 scores were below-average in every regard, even though in our tests it proved to be a quite capable unit.

The TPL-S10 comes from Toshiba’s ultra-portable stable of projectors, and while not quite as small as say, the Proxima DP1000X, it still managed to fit a fair amount of goodness into a easily manageable size.

Whenever PC Authority reviews a data projector, we try it out with DVDs and games, and we test entertainment projectors with PCs just to see how they handle applications other than those they’re specifically designed for.