This is not your atypical projector. First, it's a front projector which projects the image to a wall mounted screen. Secondly, this unit is used more often for presentations, not for home theaters. Third, this unit is based on a relatively new technology, DLP (digital light projector). DLP uses several hundred thousand mirrors that rotate to redirect the image to your screen. Picture quality is somewhat like an LCD projector, with pixels visible on screen if you look real close.
The DLP picture has one major advantage over LCDs, it can display blacks darker than LCDs. LCDs will show black as a dark gray, but DLPs are a lot darker (but not as dark as CRTs).

The resolution of the DLP is 800x600. Colors are good, with four temperature settings (warm I is the best). You can adjust the screen aspect ratio to display anamorphic or non-anamorphic images while in video mode. However, when looking at diagonal lines on the screen, stair stepping is quite evident. Now, this would not be acceptable for most people, but when this projector is hooked up to a DVDO line processor ($700), all the stair stepping problems virtually disappear.

One significant drawback is that when you use the DVDO doubler, the outputs from the doubler are RGB. The projector cannot adjust the aspect ratio in RGB mode. This problem can be rectified by using the 4:3 aspect ratio from the DVD player, but this will introduce some artifacting from the conversion process while viewing anamorphic DVDs. Using a Sony DVD player will eliminate most of the artifacts from the down conversion, but when you enlarge the image to what this projector can do, you will definitely notice a softening of the image.

Still, all in all, this a great value, for about $6000 including the line doubler (I heard you can get the projector for a lot less) you can get a home theater you won't be ashamed of. The unit can easily project a 8 ft wide image in a dark room, and it does not have a problem of CRT degradation. If the lamp burns out, you can easily replace it (it is rated for 2000 hours, 500 lumens)

By the way, this unit is very similar to the Dream Vision DLP 500 projector as reviewed in Home Theater in Sept 99. Davis does have other projectors with added features, such as higher resolution (up tp 1024x768), higher output (800 lumens) and a video scanning processor, but they will add a few thousand to the price. Check it out if you can afford it.