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This is a bit long and I'm mostly writing it for my own amusement rather than trying to be genuinely informative, but it's possibly a topic worth discussing, especially for those of us who love projectors but always work with a bit of a tight budget. Back in the 1990s when I started buying DVDs (having missed out on the whole Laserdisc thing), I was super keen to see the wonders of widescreen, only to be disappointed by the unimpressive sight of a 2.35:1 image displayed on a good quality Sony 68cm Trinitron. You could see the potential and for the first time for a lot of my favourite movies I could actually see the whole damn frame, but boy was it small. I hankered after a better solution. At the time, the rear-projection TV was about the only affordable way to get a bigger image but the sheer size of them didn't appeal to me. A 68cm Trinitron was already a huge, heavy, heat creating beast of a thing. Fast forward to 2004 and I had enough scratch to contemplate one of the new budget projectors that catered especially for DVD (progressive scan! anamorphic out of the box!). These were a big deal back then, most projection systems had been based around 3-CRT setups from Barco and the like and required a full installation. The new range of projectors that were being produced around DLP tech were revolutionary. So I stumped up the $1500 and bought a Benq PB6200. The PB6200 was one of a few projectors built around the same chip, all of them had similar specs. The Benq got some rave reviews for the price and it proved to be stunning when brought home - at least compared to squinting at a CRT. It was marvellous. The picture was bright and solid and the rubbish mastering of a lot of 2000s DVDs (crushed blacks, mpeg artifacts) meant that it's limitations were not as noticeable as you might think today. Sure - it leaked light, couldn't really pull off a convincing black and I saw the odd rainbow effect now and again, but having that huge image splashed onto the wall made up for it. An added bonus? While only 1024/768 native, it did a convincing job of displaying 1080i over the component inputs when HD tv started broadcasting in Australia. All this before HDMI gobbled the industry, everything over massive handfuls of component cable. Then, HDMI took over the industry. I avoided it for a long time just to keep my precious projector running. Eventually I had to capitulate as modern equipment started dropping support for component video and Bluray was the final nail in the coffin - no HD over component. I got around this with a stack of dongles (EDID injector, HDMI to component converter) and the Benq just kept chugging like a champ. 3 bulbs and I have forgotten how many thousands of hours of happy viewing. The sound of the screen being pulled down on the chain and the startup fan noise of the PB6200 was a sign for the family to get grabbed by the couch and enjoy the wonders of affordable home cinema. At 15 years old, the poor old thing was full of dust blobs and the support for 1080i started to look sketchy (one of the Google Chromecasts I bought refused to do 1080i) but we didn't care. There was always a cheap LCD tv for daytime viewing but the Benq still smashed out a believable picture. Then, the final straw that was the awful 2020 - the power supply in the Benq finally carked it. Not sure whether it was helped along by an electrical storm (my tech couldn't be sure what killed it). It was dead, could not be revived, no spare parts available at a reasonable price. I was devastated and thanks to the wonders of 2020 skint. Searches for cheap projectors usually came up pretty empty and it seemed like 1080 projector specifications hadn't really moved that much in 15 years anyway, which was something of a surprise (quieter, yes, and better contrast, sure, but nothing really groundbreaking). A 4k projector was just out of the question. So I caved and bought a Kogan F500. I had read on the internet many times to completely avoid cheap projectors. although the details were always a bit vague. I started to get the feeling that dumping on a cheap projector on the internet was a way to justify the $5k and up prices of whatever the poster had bought for themselves. The F500 was a fairly obvious stretch of the truth from Kogan - they claimed 3800 lumens out of an LED bulb (for comparison, the Benq on a fresh bulb was 1700 lumen and unwatchable in a bright room). I knew for a start that was going to be garbage but the promise of native HD and eliminating my stack of cheap chinese dongles appealed greatly - as did the price ($289.99). I mean, for $300 what could possibly go wrong? It was cheaper than the cheapest 2nd hand HD projector on Ebay or anywhere. How bad could it be? The answer - not awful, not unwatchable, but so annoying I had to stop using it. For balance, I'm going to list the good features first: It was plenty bright, it's not 3800 lumen (I didn't measure it) but was about the same as the Benq with a fresh bulb. It is genuinely native HD - the resolution was a genuine improvement even at the 4m or so seating distance we use. It did a good-verging-on-great contrast on greyscale and smashes the Benq on black levels. My first impression was "hey, this thing is actually OK". It looked good with some live sport, no noticeable lag and overall pretty engaging. Bonus - LED lamp meant no lamp replacements and hopefully no dimming over time like the lamps in the Benq. Now for the bad. The lens is not adjustable like a Benq so the screen size is wholly dependent on the throw distance. So there is no flexibility whatsoever on placement. "No problem" I cheerily thought looking at the massive picture that dwarfed my old pull-down screen. I yoinked the screen and just threw that picture up on the wall. It's so huge! However, it's a big strike for those who need flexibility and to be honest, the wall isn't a great screen. My wife was ecstatic that the screen was gone - I will have to paint the wall at some stage. Then the second bad point made itself apparent - the Kogan doesn't do skin tones. At all. Every face is a plastic mess. On the standard picture settings a red bloom appeared on any and all skin tones that made everybody look like they had crimson burst blood vessels all over their cheeks and hands. No problem I thought, can be adjusted out. I did manage to tame that particular beast by pushing the contrast to a warning level on the menu and never using anything other than the "cool" picture settings. Faces still look annoyingly plastic though. Third bad point - the Kogan doesn't do Yellow. It does shades of Green, but never yellow. Not even close, no matter how much you fiddled with it, no yellow. Fourth bad point - it was permanently out of focus on the right hand side. No amount of adjustment or alignment could remove the fact that somewhere in the internal optics, the LCD panel was not lined up with the lens. Fifth bad point and the reason I gave up using it - the fan is so fantastically noisy it drowns out any and all subtlety in a movie soundtrack. It's like sitting under an idling 737. It was so loud it impeded conversation. It's loud. The worst part of this is that none of these things are hard to fix - it would likely make the thing a $400 projector instead of a $300 projector, but for the want of a bit of quality control and a more expensive fan the F500 could have been the bargain of the century it's so close to being watchable. Incredibly frustrating. Anyway, one too many beers and an over-active thumb on Ebay over New Years landed a 2nd hand Mitsubishi HC7000 on my door step. Now, I lusted over the HC7000 last decade and the quasi-unavailability of it just made we want it more, but the $5k pricetag was never going to happen in my house. However, a single moment of weakness ("surely it will go for more than $450!!!") and here it is. I haven't installed it yet, just plopped it on a cabinet to see if it worked but good gravy it's a lovely thing: - motorised lens adjustment - heaven. - so quiet, so very quiet. Can't really hear it unless you are really close - heaven. - the skin tones are to die for - the black levels are astonishing - even on the wall the picture just looks glossy and the shadow details on black suits etc. amazing - YELLOW HOW I MISSED YOU - things I thought were MPEG artifacts turned out to be projector artifacts - e.g. the Bluray of Top Gun, opening scenes of steam blowing over the carrier deck look like...steam. So in conclusion - cheap projectors aren't a complete waste of time if you can live with the limitations (although with 75" LCD tvs becoming so affordable the whole PJ vs TV thing becomes interesting anyway). If it wasn't for the quality issues of the Kogan F500 (not sold any more) were all little issues that could be addressed by the manufacturer without a lot of work. However, once you've seen a decent projector, the F500 (and I presume others in that price range) are just too flawed for regular use. Maybe out on the deck for a movie evening outside or whatever, but regular viewing will drive you nuts. As a 2nd hand prospect, the Mitsubishi HC7000 is a massive gamble (lots of things to go wrong) however this one is superb so I'm happy again. Caveat emptor and all that.