Over the past 18 months, high-definition (HD) home entertainment systems have become available to the U.S. consumer, albeit with a substantial price tag. These systems are based almost exclusively on direct view and rear projection cathode ray tube (CRT) technology. More recently however, a number of manufacturers have made announcements portending the arrival of high-definition television (HDTV) projection systems based on alternative display rechnologies such as transmissive and reflective liquid crystal display (LCD), and digital light processor (DLP) technology. Many of these announcements promise excellent image quality, but demonstrations of prototype systems have shown that there is much variability in subjective image quality from system to system. This paper examines some of the image quality characteristics of representative samples of several LCD and DLP-based projection display technologies as compared to those of CRT-based HD sets. Modulation transfer function (MTF) characteristics are compared, as well as quantitative image quality metrics, using several established methods.