[Editor's note: this review is excerpted from John's write-up of the 2004 Projector Expo.] 

An excellent projector in just about every regard. The Sharp is sexier looking than the 7205, but is also much larger and heavier. I was very pleased to see that Sharp had eliminated the orange push in the reds - when we played THE REPLACEMENTS clip, the football uniforms were appropriately red, not orange (which was how they were rendered by the older 10000 and the BenQ PE8700). The green of the grass was only slightly lime (again an improvement over the 10000), and the depth in the high contrast mode was second to none, except the 777 and possibly the NEC HT-1100 (which might have equaled it). The overall picture was smooth and detailed.

When we switched to high brightness mode on the Carada Brilliant White screen, the Sharp 12000 colors looked almost neon and oversaturated (keep in mind, though, this was with out of the box settings, as the Sharp was not calibrated before the show). In this mode, the picture was plenty bright and I would not have a problem recommending the Sharp for screens up to 125", provided it was used with a higher gain white screen in a totally light controlled environment. In high contrast mode, I'd say the 110" white was about as large as you'd want to go.

We placed the 12000 on the 110" Firehawk for a brief period. On high brightness mode it looked very good with this screen material (and did a fair job of rejecting ambient light), but to me looked way too dim when we switched over to the high contrast mode. This projector is clearly at its best when combined with a white screen (like the Carada Brilliant White we had it on, or a StudioTek) and run in high contrast mode. With that combination, the Sharp had one of the smoothest pictures I have seen on DLP projector, with the deepest blacks of the show.

The remote and the menus were very simple to operate.