One of the most famous screen kisses in movie history takes place in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant lock lips while the camera encircles them. Watch this rarefied romantic moment on a small screen and you might admire the ingenuity behind the camera move. But watch it on a big screen — say, about nine and a half feet wide — and this passage of cinematic virtuosity takes on a shattering, dizzying, heart-stopping emotional impact.

Beautiful cinema moments are as breathakingly big as their directors intended.

That in a nutshell is what makes a DLP front-projector like the InFocus ScreenPlay 5700 worth owning. With a picture that can be up to 65 inches high by 116 inches wide, in 16:9 widescreen proportions, it is powerful enough to suspend disbelief and take you into another world.

OK, the 5700 does not support the full resolution of high-definition television. The DLP chip that drives it, Texas Instruments' Matterhorn, has resolution of 1024 by 576 dotted pixels, which is more than a match for DVD's 720 by 480, but not quite high enough for HDTV's minimum of 1280 by 720. Still, many hardcore movie lovers on a budget are happy to trade off some resolution for more emotional punch. The Matterhorn does downconvert HDTV to its own native resolution, and delivers as good a picture with DVD as any of the several DLP projectors I've reviewed.

Thanks to DLP technology, getting a big picture doesn't mean acquiring a doghouse-sized projector along with it. The 5700 weighs just nine pounds, allowing easy ceiling or wall mounting, and is smaller than a briefcase — there's even a handle on the front panel! Enabling this miracle of miniaturization is an imaging chip covered with tiny micro-mirrors that act as light valves to produce each pixel, or picture element.

With a multitude of jacks, the 5700 can accommodate plenty of video sources.

The 5700 is a one-chip projector and its underlying DLP chip handles all three of video's colors (red, green, blue) simultaneously. To separate the colors, a color wheel flashes each one sequentially at a speed greater than most eyes can detect. Some color wheels produce a much-complained-of "rainbow effect," but the 5700 is less subject to this effect thanks to its six-segment wheel, which rapidly flashes each color twice.

On the back panel are enough jacks to accommodate a whole bunch of video sources. The digital interfaces include DVI (with HDCP copyright protection), D5 for use with high end DVD players from Japan, VESA (for computer input), and various analog video ins. The latter include component video (two), S-video (two), and composite video (one). To integrate the projector into a custom home theater interface, other jacks support an infrared remote control and two 12-volt triggers to drop a retractable screen and adjust curtains that alter screen shape.