InFocus X9

by Hugo Jobling
Price as Reviewed $1,099.00

InFocus already wowed us with the launch of the X10 a short while ago, offering a great 1080p DLP projector at a fantastic price and it look set to do the same thing with the X9. The x9 sacrifices a Full HD resolution, being merely 720p (a.k.a. HD Ready), but by doing so comes in at a fantastic low price, and doesn't skimp much elsewhere, either.

The 1,280 x 720 resolution is provided by a Texas Instruments DLP chip and is backed up by a 6-segment colour wheel. InFocus claims the X9 has a 2,300:1 native contrast ratio and can produce a 1,800 ANSI lumens brightness, which is about in line with the X10 - so image quality should, resolution aside, be pretty similar.

Connectivity isn't a particular strong point of the X9, with a single HDMI port, Component connector, composite input and S-video in, as well as a VGA port. However, with a projector using an HDMI switch box and having a single cable running to the device is almost certainly a preferable option anyway, so the lack on inputs isn't exactly a problem.

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InFocus X10

By John Archer
Latest Price £907.68

Once in a while a product comes out of nowhere and blows out of the water any preconceptions we might have of the AV market. Cue the InFocus X10 projector...

This is a pretty bold start to a review, I guess. But I promise I'm not being sensationalist just to keep you reading. The X10 really does rewrite the rulebook, completely shifting our established frame of reference when it comes to evaluating other projectors in the future.
The key to our excitement about the X10 lies in the following, simple facts: it's a Full HD DLP projector selling for under £900.

This totally demolishes the previous lowest price point of any other Full HD DLP projector we've seen; even Optoma's ‘cheapo' HD80 still costs you around £1,750 new.

Our searches did uncover another Optoma DLP model, the 8000X, going for around £1,000 - but we've seen absolutely zero marketing for this product, and it also seems to be available through extremely limited distribution channels. So it hardly seems poised to make the same sort of waves we're predicting the X10 will. Having said that, rest assured we're already doing our best to get hold of an 8000X for review.

Anyway, getting back to the X10, its price also seriously upsets the Full HD LCD applecart. For instance, we struggled to find Panasonic's good Full HD PT-AE2000 or Epson's disappointing Full HD EMP-TW1000 going for less than £1900 as we put this article together.

In fact, from what I can gather from InFocus representatives, one of the reasons InFocus has been so aggressive with the X10's pricing is that it really wants the model to boot LCD out of the home cinema projector market altogether.

But you know, it's hard to resist the thought that its price is so low it might be in danger of making it tough for any projector maker - including InFocus itself! - to make any sort of margins going forward. Time will tell, I guess.

Still, in the short term at least these sorts of concerns aren't really our problem as punters at all. In fact, such price-slashing madness is amazingly good news for the reams of people out there who'd love to indulge in home cinema in its most large-scale form but never thought they'd be able to afford the necessary high-spec projector.

And believe us, the X10 really is high spec, despite its lowly price. For starters, as well as that key Full HD pixel count, it's got all the connections you'd expect of a projector costing many times more, including two Deep Color-compatible v1.3 digital inputs (one HDMI, and one all-purpose M1-DA input for which the necessary HDMI adaptor is provided).

The X10 also claims a very respectable 2,500:1 ‘native' contrast ratio - as in, a contrast ratio which, unlike the figures quoted by most LCD projectors, does not depend on a brightness-reducing dynamic iris system to achieve its full extent.

Even better, though, the X10 does have OPTIONAL manual iris adjustment that you can select from its onscreen menus, complete with various settings. With this you can expand the projector's claimed contrast ratio to 7,500:1 - a really outstanding figure for the sub-£1k market.

Also rather remarkable for the X10's price is its claimed maximum brightness of 1,200 ANSI Lumens, making it bright enough to deliver the key ‘D65' colour standard calculated to produce the most natural results when watching video footage.

There's a much wider selection of video adjustments at your disposal with the X10 than you might expect too, including multiple gamma presets; optional overscan removal (an essential item on a Full HD projector); colour space, temperature, gamut and control tweaks; a flesh-tone adjustment; the software part of Texas Instruments' BrilliantColor system; and even, incredibly, all the facilities you need to have the projector professionally calibrated to suit your particular living room conditions by a certified Imaging Science Foundation engineer. This latter feature was once deemed as a premium trick for only the most discerning of buyers. Not any more, it would seem.

So far the X10 has done nothing but massively surpass the expectations raised by its price point. And for the most part this continues into its ease of use, too.

To help you set it up, for instance, its unusually large, matt black body is positioned on a swivelling, tilting foot mount, making it a doddle to get the image in the right place on your screen. Further assistance comes from digital vertical image shifting and keystone correction, and there's a passable amount of optical zoom, too. Though I do have a bit of a gripe here, for oddly the lens is a slightly long-throw affair, meaning it requires quite a large room to deliver a really big picture - not, perhaps, an ideal situation for a budget model.

Before we get into seeing how the X10 delivers on its seemingly remarkable specification level, it does have one potential Achilles' Heel lurking among all the facts and figures: a DarkChip 1 (DC1) DLP chipset.

In case you're not familiar with the DarkChip story, some of the very latest projectors, including InFocus's own IN83, are starting to use DarkChip4 technology, and we've been through DarkChip2 and Darkchip 3 along the way. So you can get a sense of how relatively ‘over the hill' the X10's core DLP engine is, at least on paper.

Which just goes to show how pointless it is to judge something ‘on paper'. For in reality, the X10 doesn't perform like a DC1 projector at all. In fact, remarkably, its pictures have more in common with a few DC3 models we've seen.

Also nothing short of remarkable is how bright the picture looks. DLP projectors at the X10's sort of price point traditionally struggle to give images any real dynamism, but there's dynamism aplenty on show here, even during the dark scenes that make up National Treasure 2's final half hour in the Olmec caverns.

Of course, brightness alone does not a great video picture make. But don't worry; while the best picture quality on the X10 is achieved with the iris slightly closed (I personally set it to between 64 and 73), the resulting loss of brightness isn't at all severe in the context of the benefits you reap in terms of black level improvement.

With the iris slightly closed the black levels you can achieve are simply in a different world to anything - repeat, ANYTHING - else we've seen anywhere at anything like the X10's price.

And still we're not even close to being done with the good news, for the X10 is also streets ahead of its price point with its colour saturations. They're both radiantly rich - as is spectacularly apparent during the HD Disney logo that precedes the National Treasure 2 presentation - and, even more remarkably, terrifically natural in tone. For instance, all the faces on show in the lecture theatre where Ed Harris's character drops his historical ‘bombshell' are rendered with emphatically authentic toning, even though this scene is, by its nature, rather dark. There's not a PC-biased colour tone in sight.

For starters, the X10's picture is almost unbelievably sharp. While watching the nice-picture-shame-about-the-movie Blu-ray of National Treasure 2, the definition in the actors' faces during the bright White House egg hunt sequence is little short of jaw-dropping. There's exceptional fine detailing, total crispness, and a complete absence of video noise. What's more, the outstanding detail levels also help generate a terrific sense of depth to the image, revealing every last subtlety of focus as the image trails into the distance.

Actually, the detailing here is so cute that it slightly reveals the shots of the White House for what they actually are: a special effects addition achieved through the miracle of blue-screen…

I'd really doubted that a projector as cheap as this one could deliver the full benefit a 1,920 x 1,080 pixel count can bring to an HD movie. But as well as the detail and lack of noise already noted, I was also struck by the purity of colour blends, as the X10's extra pixel density does away with the vast majority of the ‘colour banding' problem that can afflict budget projectors.

Finding any explanation at all for how InFocus has managed to make the X10 so cheap is a monumental effort. In fact, I couldn't find one. The bottom line is simply that if the X10 were £500 more, it would still look like a bargain.

This is not meant to imply, of course, that the projector is perfect. Thankfully for the rest of the projection market there are two or three areas where you can get improvements if you spend more.

Potentially the biggest problem is the X10's susceptibility to DLP's rainbow effect. This refers to stripes of pure red, green and blue that can flit about for a split second in your peripheral vision, or over very bright parts of the image, as a result of the machinations of DLP's colour wheel mechanism.

I was definitely slightly aware of this happening on a few occasions while watching National Treasure 2, especially during the dark scenes toward the film's end, where bright points of light stand out against predominantly dark backgrounds.

You can reduce the rainbow effect's impact on the X10 by closing the iris to limit the image's brightness, and personally I consider the issue a small price to pay for all the remarkable things the X10 gets right. But I know some people are more susceptible to the rainbow effect than others, so it's definitely something you need to be aware of. Maybe you should try and get a demo of the unit before you buy, just to see if the rainbow effect is particularly bothersome for you.

A far less troubling issue is some extremely low-level grey pixel noise over very dark parts of the picture, though this is seldom if ever distracting. In fact, you might not even see it at all if you don't go looking for it. Which of course you will now that I've mentioned it here. Sorry…

A final point would be that motion doesn't look quite as fluid or crisp as we'd ideally like. But again, this is seldom a distracting issue, and I'm almost embarrassed I mentioned it at all given that we're talking about a Full HD DLP projector costing under £900.

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InFocus IN15

by Rich Malloy
Current Price: $1,169.00 - $1,565.96

The IN15 is remarkably thin at just 1.7 inches. You’ve probably read hardcover books that were thicker. And while this model is pricier than other XGA ultraportable projectors that offer similar brightness, InFocus sweetens the deal with convenient features.

In the case of the IN15, thin doesn’t mean light; while it fits into our ultraportable category, its weight of 3.9 pounds is heavier than the 2.7-pound Dell M209X and the 3.2-pound Optoma TX7155. With all its accoutrements (such as the included AC, VGA, and composite video cables), the weight is closer to 5 pounds.

We can deal with the extra weight given this projector’s surprising number of special features. First there’s the motor-driven optical zoom: Just press a button on the remote and the image zooms to double its size—much larger than the 10 percent increase on almost all other projectors. The IN15 also produced one of the largest images we have seen: 52 inches diagonal at a distance of only 60 inches. Like the optical zoom, focusing is also motor-driven at the touch of a button.

For those who like an absolutely rectangular image, the projector will automatically correct for any keystone or trapezoidal shape problems. We also like the flip-down lens cap that is not only handy but also impossible to lose.

Like most credit-card–size remote controls, the IN15 remote lacks both a laser pointer and any buttons for navigating a PowerPoint slide show. It does, however, have buttons for controlling this model’s motorized focus and optical zoom features. There is also a handy button for switching to low-power Eco mode that drops the noisy cooling fan down to a more tolerable volume while lowering the brightness by only 20 percent.

With such a small size, a few features had to be omitted. These include an S-Video connector, USB port, and an audio speaker. However, speakers on portable projectors are usually so mediocre that it’s a minor loss.

On our lab tests, the IN15 did fairly well. It scored a brightness level of 2271 lumens—below the advertised value but within the traditional industry margin of overstatement. The contrast ratio was good, measuring 488:1. As is typical for DLP-based projectors, the yellow colors had a dull mustard-like look. In general, images seemed a bit fuzzy, caused by significant “comet tails” on individual pixels.

We knocked the older Casio version of this projector for its expensive $499 replacement lamp. The InFocus replacement lamp is a much more reasonable $365 (at www.superwarehouse.com). Too bad the IN15 requires a rather slow 61 seconds to cool down.

The IN15 is an attractively slim and full-featured projector. However, the nearly identical Casio XJ-S46, which costs $100 more, includes a speaker and a USB connector that lets you attach a wireless LAN adapter or run slideshows from a thumb drive without a PC. If you can live without those features, the IN15 is a solid choice for presenters on the go.

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InFocus Work Big IN10

by Rich Malloy

In the world of ultraportable projectors, InFocus was king. For years its amazing 2-pound LP120 model had been setting the benchmark for devices in this category. But this venerable model had been usurped by new generations of projectors with slightly more heft but much greater luminosity. Finally, InFocus has introduced the Work Big IN10, its new standard bearer in the tiny projector market, and perhaps the most ironically named member of the company’s Work Big product line.

Pared Down Design and Features

At a weight of 2.4 pounds, the IN10 is a bit heavier than the LP120, but it’s quite a bit brighter—nearly 1,800 ANSI lumens versus 1,100 on the older model. This is still somewhat lower than the 2,000-lumen mark that is now popular among business projectors, but the IN10 should have no trouble making an impression in most environments.

Of course, ultraportable projectors get that way by shedding all but the most useful features, and the IN10 may represent the epitome of that approach. For example, there is no monitor-out connector for use with a desktop display. Nor are there any other connectors beyond those most needed by the majority of presenters: just four input ports—computer, composite video, S-Video, and audio. In fact, the computer connector does triple duty by also handling a USB control line and component video (the latter requires an optional cable).

But the real simplicity of the system reveals itself in the remote control, which has only six buttons for power, input source and navigation of slide shows and the projector’s menu. Gone is the confusing array of rarely used buttons such as digital zoom. The only feature that we miss is a laser pointer.

One of the best qualities of the IN10 is its 120-Watt lamp. The company claims it will last 4,000 hours at full power, which is twice as long as most other projectors. Of course, at $419 for a replacement bulb, it’s nearly twice as expensive, too. We also liked the 1.3X optical zoom lens and the generous 10-foot AC cable, both of which give you some much needed flexibility regarding projector placement.

Performance

In our lab tests, the IN10 gave a moderate if not mediocre level of performance. We measured the brightness at 1,658 lumens, which is just 8 percent below the claimed value, and within the industry standard of hyperbole. In our checkerboard test the contrast ratio came in at an unspectacular 410:1. Brightness uniformity, corner to center, was a better-than-average 72 percent. The cooldown time was fairly slow, at 61 seconds.

The IN10 did better in our subjective tests. Its images were quite sharp, but we did notice slight blue comet tails in the upper right. The projector did amazingly well in its ability to resolve very dark and very light grays. We were somewhat disappointed, however, in our video playback tests. Granted, we did not have a suitable component video cable available, but our tests with an S-Video cable showed a slightly higher level of jaggies than we have seen with other models. Also, the IN10’s cooling fan was surprisingly noisy for such a small projector. And, unlike most other projectors, this model lacks a low-power mode that could quiet the fan.

Verdict

The InFocus Work Big IN10 is a solid ultraportable projector at a reasonable price. However, it is facing some tough competition in the featherweight end of the projector market. The Dell M209X is only slightly heavier yet significantly brighter and $200 cheaper. Also, the widescreen Optoma EP1691 is not only well suited to today’s wide-aspect-ratio laptops (and HDTV), but like the Dell model it is significantly brighter and more affordable. Even InFocus itself has launched some potent competitors: The recently announced IN1100 weighs 2.8 pounds and beams out 2,100 ANSI lumens at a price just $100 higher than that of the IN10. And while all this competition may be unfortunate for the IN10, it is the best news yet for ultraportable projector buyers.

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