The Bottom Line: For the price, I'm not sure you could beat this for home theater use. Competitive products cost at least $600 more and often more than $1000 higher.

My BenQ arrived last night, so I set it up next to the Infocus X1 I've been using as a substitute. There is no comparison between them (of course, for more than twice the money I expect to get better performance.) Note: I am using this projector primarily for home theater, with a little presentation work anticipated. I have not yet hooked a computer to it.

Compared to the X1, the colors look more natural right out of the box, the picture is much sharper, and the processing seems smoother. The biggest improvement, though, is the brightness, which makes watching with room lights on possible -- not so with the X1. Also, no issues so far with color distortion or ghosting (if you have read about DLPs with 3 segment color wheels, you are familiar with this phenomenon at least in concept, I presume), which has been a minor problem with the X1 (watching Pirates of the Caribbean DVD). Also, the zoom is much more flexible than that of the X1, making placement in the room somewhat more flexible for a given screen size. So far my only gripe is that the menus are not as intuitive to use as the X1 (or most other tech hardware that I've used lately.)

I've got a regular DVD player (not progressive scan) hooked in through component video(Y, Pb, Pr), and a standard (not HD) Hughes DirectTV box hooked in through S-video. The picture improvement was most noticeable with the DirectTV, which was borderline unpleasant with the X1. (I'm using an 84" diagonal, white Da-lite 4:3 screen, and sitting within 10-11 feet. If you moved out beyond 15 feet, the picture with the X-1 was acceptable.)

I may edit this later, if I can, when I've had more time to really work with the projector, but my initial reaction is that this is a good low priced unit which can be a credible home theater purchase for a lot less than most units with similar specs. Note, however, that I have only sampled this unit and the X1 in a real home environment, so I can't compare this unit to those more expensive items. This review is aimed at entry folks, not home theater afficianados or folks with big budgets.

--- Added after a weekend with the unit.

I have noticed (confirmed by others) that there is definitely a 'hot spot' in one corner of the display. I will be contacting BenQ customer support regarding this. For my purposes it doesn't affect viewing very much, as it is not in the main viewing area, but it might be problematic for presentation work.

Also: Picture quality really picked up when I set the DVD player and the projector to 16:9. As good as it was, this is better. so far no noticeable artifacts or issues. The only time I've noticed any color artifacts was while running the THX optimzer utilities. I suppose I need to try something truly B & W to get a better feel for this.