Labs

Epson's EMP-TW680 looks stylish, with off-white curves and a silver lens. Its lens shift controls enable you to place the projector off-centre from your screen and align the picture. There's lots of room for adjustment, with a vertical shift of 96 per cent and a horizontal shift of 47 per cent.

As with the other LCD home cinema projector in this group - BenQ's W500 - the EMP-TW680 has a dynamic iris. This constantly adjusts the light the projector emits, giving a contrast ratio

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of 10,000:1, which is by far the highest in this group. This was also the brightest home cinema projector at 1,600 ANSI lumens, so you can watch films in well-lit rooms.

Our HD clips were flawless once we'd adjusted the picture settings. The Windows desktop was the crispest here over analogue and digital connections. Images were sharp and detailed, whether from stills, HD or standard-definition video. Colours were vibrant and skin tones realistic, with dark blacks and bright whites. Standard-definition images showed more noise than those from BenQ's W500 in areas of solid colour, though.

While the BenQ W500 can downscale 1080p-resolution footage, the EMP-TW680 can downscale only 1080i video to its native resolution of 1,280x720. Connecting your home cinema kit is easy, as there are HDMI and component inputs, a VGA input for a PC, and a D4 input (used only in Japan) with a SCART converter.

The EMP-TW680 is a great projector with amazing image quality and a low price, but BenQ's W500 has slightly better image quality and doesn't cost much more.