The home theatre projector has fallen on hard times of late, but don't let that stop you from considering this exceptional model. Both user-friendly and feature rich, it delivers an incredible high-def movie experience for the asking price. Ignore the industry doomsayers: Viewsonic's Pro8100 will make willing converts of anyone who sees it up and running.

BenQ’s W500 is an entry-level 720p home theatre projector with great brightness levels and high quality imagery. Colour accuracy isn’t perfect, and a short zoom limits options for placement. But with such a reasonable price, the W500 is a compelling option for the home cinema enthusiast.

As BenQ's flagship projector, the W20000 excels for movie watching, with high brightness and great contrast. It's massive and the fan is a little noisy, but it is a good package.

Panasonic's PT-AE2000U is a projector that performs well compared to its competition, but it needs some tweaking to achieve the best image quality.

The PLV-Z2000 is a projector that offers great picture quality, which is only slightly hampered by a small overall screen size and low brightness.

The HC4900 has lowered the entry-level price point for 1080p projectors. With good image quality and a large range of colour and image customisation options, it's very good value for money. Apart from its simplistic black plastic design and low brightness levels, the HC4900 is a high quality unit.

When it's able to be set-up correctly, the BenQ W5000 displays images with amazing clarity and colour.

Panasonic's PT-AX200E projector is great for both viewing data and movies thanks to impressive image quality and unaltered colour reproduction, but lacks Full HD output.

This is almost the perfect projector for a home theatre setup; it'll produce sublime colours whether watching Blu-ray movies or DVDs, and it's also a very quiet and relatively cool operator. However, its ability to handle dark scenes could be better and its overall image quality is a little soft.

The Epson EMP-DM1 is a great idea for a projector that doesn't quite hit it home. It has quite a few image quality problems but since it's so insanely cheap, it's a great projector for regular families that just want to watch their moves on a wall at home.

The IN78 is an excellent home theatre projector, but it's not much of an improvement over the previous model. Its price tag is also rather high, considering how little has been done to improve the product.