IF it aint broke, don't try and fix it', somebody American is alleged to have once said, and it would appear that Mitsubishi agrees. At first glance, the company's new HC6000 projector appears to be identical to the HCsooo model it replaces. That's not necessarily a bad thing: as we commented at the time, Mitsubishi deserves great credit for making such efforts to reduce the size and noise of its projectors, and as with its '5000 forebear, the HC6000 is very easy to live with. It's claimed to emit only 19dB of background noise, and while that's probably a little generous, we'd class this as one of the quietest projectors we've tried.

That makes quite a differ¬ence with subtler movies. As before, the Mitsubishi is easy to install, thanks to a short throw lens (see boxout) and fully motorised adjustments for zoom, focus and lens shift. That, coupled to easily adjustable supporting feet, a backlit remote and clear on-screen graphics makes it simple to get up and running. Most of the HC6000's key specs are unchanged, too. It's a Full HD projector with 1920 x 1080 resolution, and sports Reon-VX HQV video processing (as found in many a high-end DVD player) for deinterlacing and video scaling. Even the claimed brightness output is the same as before, at a respectable 1000 ANSI Lumens.

So what's changed?The new Mitsubishi includes the latest generation of'C2FINE' LCD panel, claimed to produce more even hues witll better, more consistent colours than before. Mitsubishi claims a 15,000:1 contrast ratio for the HC6000, as against 10,000:1 for the older model. Given that we felt black levels were the biggest weakness of the HCsooo, that bodes well. Happily, the practice lives up to the paper promise. The HC6000 digs deeper into low-light scenes, unearthing details its forebear tended to struggle with. It'll capture the murky middle sequences of The Kingdom well, and manages to make the complex finale to The Bowone Ultimatum easy to follow (which is quite some achievement).

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Motion is gripped well too, although the HC6000's deinterlacing can introduce some jagged edges with fast motion. We found feeding in a progressive-scan S76P DVD signal, leaving the projector's powerful scaling to do the rest, is preferable. Of course, switch to high-def 10SOP signals from Blu-ray, and the HC6000 looks its best: its added contrast helps to make discs like The Day After Tomorrolv really snap out from the screen. So why no five-star verdict? Only one issue, in truth: the presence of Panasonic's excellent PT-AE20ooE. It's similarly capable, but costs much less.