You probably haven't heard of Planar before. But on the evidence of the PD7060, you'll surely be hearing more about it in the future for its high-quality pictures that could well have more established rivals scurrying for cover.

Pros

Planar has hit the nail right on the head with the PD7060's delightful combination of a glossy black exterior with silver trim and a tastefully rounded shape. It also delivers plenty on the connections side, with a healthy two digital inputs--one straight HDMI and one universal M1-DA affair, a 12V trigger output for automatically kickstarting a motorized screen, plus a 3.5mm remote control jack, USB input and serial port. These latter system integration ports are crucial to the PD7060's custom installation credentials.

At the heart of the PD7060 is a Texas Instruments' DarkChip3 (DC3) DLP chipset. This should deliver greater contrast and improved motion handling versus the DarkChip2 system usually found in lower-end models.

Especially outstanding is the remarkable sharpness of its pictures. Even though the projector uses only a tweaked version of Texas Instruments' own DDP3020 image-processing engine, Planar has somehow got its 1,280 x 720-pixel resolution beamer producing levels of detail and clarity that wouldn't look out of place on a high-quality full-HD equivalent.

The DC3 effect is evident, too, in the PD7060's seriously impressive black-level response, which finds dark scenes looking heart-warmingly natural and immersive compared with the efforts of many budget projectors--especially those using LCD technology.

What's more, the PD7060 produces its profound black levels without resorting to the forced look that causes dark areas to appear hollow on lesser projectors. The image is unusually bright which helps colors seem vibrant and well-saturated, while typical DLP issues like dot noise in dark scenes and fizzing noise over motion are remarkably well-suppressed.

Cons

While the PD7060 eats HD for breakfast, the extreme sharpness of its pictures can be rather unforgiving of poor-quality sources. We guess you could argue that's more the fault of the sources than the projector.

Otherwise, the only area where we might fault the PD7060's pictures is on its rainbow effect, as it's possible to see flashes of pure red, green and blue color strips in your peripheral vision. To be fair though, this is only occasionally a problem, and even then it's a problem, which many people actually don't seem susceptible to seeing.

Our last concern with the PD7060 is that it runs rather noisily, meaning you may have to put it in some kind of housing unit if you end up having to place it near your seating position.

Bottomline

While we had no reason to doubt that Planar knows its projection onions, frankly nothing could have prepared us for what a great job the PD7060 does of unleashing the full potential of HD material. So if you're looking for a flexible, great-performing 720p big-screen centerpiece for a proper home cinema setup, this S$4,968 DLP light cannon may be worth a closer look.