The HT3000E isn’t the very best or most expensive projector SIM2 produces – that honour goes to the HT5000 – but given the performance it offers for the money, it could well be the company’s finest all-rounder.

Key to the HT3000E’s specification is its adoption of the optimum ‘full’ implementation of Texas Instruments’ BrilliantColor system. Projector manufacturers can, if they choose, adopt the colour processing teamed with older, established colour wheels (which is, as you’d expect, the cheaper option), but the HT3000E goes for the premium, best-quality option.

BrilliantColor technology explained
So, what does BrilliantColor mean, and why does it make the HT3000E so good? Essentially, the system improves brightness, contrast and, most notably of all, colour fidelity. In fact, it means this single-chip DLP (Digital Light Processing) design gets close in performance to some three-chip DLP designs, which we’d never had thought possible before.

That colour processor and colour wheel are why. To date, all single-chip DLP (Digital Light Processing) projectors have used a rotating colour wheel composed of three primary colour segments (red, R, green, G, and blue, B). This sits between the Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), the chipset that generates each pixel of picture information, and the lens: light is reflected on to the chip, then through the wheel and out on to the screen. The HT3000E is the same, except it uses a six segment colour wheel: the RGB ‘primaries’, plus cyan, magenta and yellow.

That allows for a far broader range of colours than previously available and, when teamed with the SIM2’s 10-bit video processor, it means the HT3000E can reproduce over one billion colours (most single-chip DLP designs manage 16.7million).

The improved light efficiency of the system also means more brightness and better contrast: SIM2 claims it has a 100 percent increase in brightness (and that’s after calibration) next to its forebear.

Images of depth and beauty
Alright, so that’s the science: what about the performance? Like we said: brilliant.

The HT3000E has more punch than we’d ever have imagined from a projector of its type. Images have so much depth and life, you feel you can reach into them, both with DVD and high-def signals. Motion across the screen is tracked faithfully, and edges have a beautifully crisp feel.

Just why the image is so impressive is hard to attribute to one particular facet or another: its obvious brightness and contrast catches your eye first, but as you watch, perhaps the subtlety of colour variation seduces you more. Whatever, it’s certainly a picture you could luxuriate in for hours.

As we said earlier, when push comes to shove, we’d wager SIM2’s mighty HT5000 is better still – but given its price, it ought to be.

What’s beyond doubt is that at this price, the HT3000E is a genuinely superb projector.