In this day and age, I’d say that’s a fair statement. Most power supplies are fairly well protected. CAT 6 is the primary alternative to carrying HDMI, and there are fibre and other solutions for long distances, but pricey. Still, you have the HDMI port itself.

The best solution is still to have really good surge suppression, or full conditioning… Most of the Monster gear, for example, even if you plug your projector into an under $50 surge suppressor, like theirs, if the lightening hits and your projector gets fried, Monster covers damage into the $10′s of thousands of dollars. So, even if it fails, at least no expensive out of warranty repair.

Someone on the forum is reporting that he believes the Acer H9500BD does indeed have full CMS. As soon as this is confirmed (or not), I will get back to you.

FYI, on the HDMI blurring issue, it has definitively been fixed and the HDMI output is now sharper than the VGA output. Prior to the firmware update, the VGA output had the better resolution.

As far as the SBS tearing issue, that has also been thoroughly tested and there is no evidence of 3D tearing. Needless to say, EVERYONE is stoked.

It still appears to only have one user setting and the 3D adjustments appear to be confined to the service menu, but for a projector that sells for $1600 to $1700, these changes, IMO, make this projector a steal. It also has a vertical – horizontal shift which, while not a robust as my LCD projector, allows for a fair amount of flexibility in its placement.

More sooner rather than later.

Just from reading your comment… the problem is probably the phrase “22.7 inches that you listed is only from the lens center” If I wrote that, it is wrong, it should be 22.7 inches above the screen top, (or below the screen bottom). That 22.7 inches is almost 50%.

With a 100″ 16:9 diagonal screen (my standard for these numbers), screen height is just over 49 inches, so 50% would be a touch over 24.5 inches. So the issue is where we’re measuring from. Some manufacturers look at the screen position relative to the projector, others the projector relative to the screen. Confuses the hell out of me from time to time.
Well, do let me know. And I’ll make sure things are straight! -art

Your listing of lens shift on the Epsons is misleading, showing that they have less than the Panasonic PT-AR100 when in fact they have considerably more. The 22.7 inches that you listed is only from the lens center to the closest edge of a 100″ screen (shown in the Epson manuals as Offset A), while you need to add half of the screen height to that in order to show how much the image can be adjusted. The Epson 8350, 5010, and 6010 can be placed almost 50% of screen height above the top of the image, while the Panasonic PT-AR100 can only be placed 15% above the top of the image. (The Panasonic PT-AE7000 is more flexible, slightly exceeding the flexibility of the Epsons–provided that you don’t use any horizontal lens shift. If you have to use both horizontal and vertical lens shift, the Epsons beat the Panasonic for flexibility because using the horizontal shift on the Epsons doesn’t eat into your vertical lens shift range the way that it does on the Pansonics.)