With a street price of $1,800, the Hitachi CP-S317W is one of the more expensive projectors in this roundup. Although it has one of the highest lumen ratings (1,700), our tests showed a somewhat lower number (1,204 lumens), placing it in the middle of the pack.

This is not an average projector. The CP-S317W is a confounding mix of good features and bad design. The lighted buttons on the top panel are handy, as are the projector's many inputs and the monitor pass-through. The remote control has many useful buttons, which are easy to find, and the projector showed very good image quality.

Contrast, however, is fair at best, and the CP-S317W is noisy at full brightness; the cooling fan blows out of the back of the projector, where the audience is likely to be. And the graphics cable is only 4 feet long—a definite limitation. When displaying video, the CPS317W showed posterized facial tones and olive streaks. The positive and negative points of the CP-S317W cancel each other out, leaving it as an also-ran.