[Doctor Smith]

What are the blacks like on a £800 lcd projector ie sanyo or Panasonic are they like LCD tvs blacks or better

[Gae]

About the same to better, but not perfect.
I spent ages calibrating both my graphics card overlay settings and the settings on my Panny AE900. After hours and hours of tweaking I eventually found settings that I was happy with. I set the Brightness to quite low and the contrast to quite high on both card and projector and I get a pretty good depth of dark to light. It isn't jet black for sure but as good as possible on an LCD.
Good calibration is very important.

Gae

[spooney]

My Sanyo is calibrated to 65k and has a glass filter to compensate.
My room is light-controlled and I use a grey DYI screen, which adds to heavy blacks.
I found the blacks too dominant in many scenes and changed a player setting to cut back a bit. My next screen will be white

[LV426]

Depends how dark you can get your room. No projector can compensate for ambient light spilling onto the screen. In this respect, no projector can be "as good" as a direct view screen.

[gazbarber]

It should be better than than LCD TV (at least any i've seen recently) but will not be as good as a good plasma (i.e. one that cost more than said projectors and gives a much smaller image) and can't compete with good old CRT.

Most people find the lastest LCD projectors have a decent and certainly livable black level, if you want better you'd have to move to a good DLP or a DILA. The newer 1080p LCD's appear to have improved on the black levels again.