Sometimes rags do turn to riches. Sometimes that tattered little girl selling matches wipes those smudges from her cheeks and strides down the runways of Milan. Sometimes that stoner behind the register at Rax sells a million copies of his rhyming ode to big butts. Sometimes an African-American dry cleaner moves into a deluxe apartment in the sky. And sometimes, a modest little deal-a-day web site gets its hands on something far above its station.

Such is the case with the InFocus ScreenPlay 7205 HD DLP Projector. You’ve seen home theater projectors here before, and they were nice or whatever. But the 7205, now, this is the rilly-o dilly-o. Start with the 720p high-definition resolution. Move on to the 2200:1 contrast ratio. Nod hello to the massive image size, up to 11’ diagonal. Then sidle on up to the $1,500 price tag. Yes, it’s pricey, but how often do you get to save a thousand bucks on anything?

Even that lofty sum is a mere pittance for a projector packed with more high-end goodies than a thousand Harry & David gift baskets. The Texas Instruments HD2+ Mustang chip has a native 1280x720 resolution, not a funky 768 resolution that will suffer from scaling problems. No, Faroudja isn’t the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq War; it’s the company that manufactures the Faroudja FLI2310 DCDi de-interlacer, flawlessly rendering HD and non-HD, film- and video-based images alike. The variable-speed 7-segment color wheel comes calibrated to the same strict standards that the movie palaces of Hollywood demand. And if you don’t understand why the all-glass Carl Zeiss 1.3x lens is so awesome, all we can do is shake our heads in pity.

We understand nobody goes to a yard sale prepared to buy an original Eames desk, and nobody comes to Woot expecting to spend fifteen hundred bucks on anything. But if maximizing the intensity of your entertainment pleasure is important to you…if you’re not just some TV poseur with a 13” black & white Zenith…if TV and movies really are more important to you than real life…you’ll put your money where your eyeballs are.

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