PRODUCT REVIEW: JUNE 11, 2007
InFocus Play Big IN78 Home Theater Projector
InFocus’ Play Big IN78 does a lot of things right, although it is high on price, low on resolution, and hit a flat note during the review.
There once was a time when InFocus was the undisputed leader in the business projector channel. Founded in 1984, the Wilsonville, OR-based company was for many years the Atlanta Braves of the projection world, contending with the likes of Sharp, Epson, NEC, and Proxima (who InFocus eventually bought) for the #1 spot in market share and sales — and usually winning, year after year.
Around the turn of the century, InFocus decided to get into the home theater market with an innovative line of single-chip DLP projectors, followed by a three-chip design and an abortive attempt at selling and OEMing rear-projection HDTVs. The acquisition of ASK Proxima a few years back and some financial missteps by management cost the company its leadership in projector sales and hammered its stock price.
Today, the company is still hanging in there, although not nearly the imposing force it once was. The RPTVs are just a bad memory and the home theater line (and business projector line, too) were recently overhauled with the launch of the “Big” series, including the Work Big IN2X — IN4X and Play Big IN7X projectors.
Figure 1. A side view of InFocus’ Play Big IN78 projector.
The Play Big IN78 is the latest, top-of-the-line 720p home theater light box from InFocus. It debuted at Cedia Expo 2006, although its appearance was completely overshadowed by the surprise appearance of several low-price full 1080p LCD projectors from Mitsubishi, JVC, Sony, Panasonic, and Epson.
OUT OF THE BOX
The Play Big projectors are distinguished by an unusual aerodynamic design that I haven’t seen anyone else use. The integral projector base has an internal gimbal mount, which means the projector’s pitch and yaw can be adjusted to almost any position you like, whether the projector is table-mounted or ceiling mounted. (A nice touch for fast installation.)
The finish, which is piano black, complements this futuristic look, which could have come out of the top styling houses in Europe (recall Pinifarina’s designs for Ferrari and Porsche in the 1960s and 1970s). The 1.3:1 manual zoom lens is offset to one side, balanced by silver-gray inlays on either side of the housing. There are a few recessed controls on the top, but the most prominent adjustment is the coaxial focus/zoom knob pair right above the lens.
Input connections are basic, but adequate. You’ll find one each composite video, S-video, and component YPbPr video inputs, as well as a single HDMI jack and a M1-DA jack (requires an adapter to use with a DVI cable). The M1-DA input also doubles as a PC connection for gaming or watching video from your PC. A 12V DC screen trigger and RS-232 jack round out the connector complement.
Figure 2. Rear view, showing all connectors.
The M1-DA jack requires an adapter to work with HDMI or DVI connections.
REMOTE AND MENUS
One thing I have always liked about InFocus’ remote controls is that they are simple and intuitive. There are only thirteen buttons to play with including three User presets, and the remote has excellent range as log as you aim it at the front of the projector, or the screen. It doesn’t work quite as snappily behind the projector.
If you want menu options, you’ve got ‘em with the IN78. InFocus lets you adjust almost everything except the line voltage, time of day, and relative humidity (OK, maybe that’s a bit over the top) in a series of basic and advanced menus.
In addition to basic image parameters, you can tweak picture gamma, although not by numerical values; only by factory presets. Those include CRT, Film, Video, PC, and Bright Room. There’s also a white peaking control that changes the sequencing of the color wheel. You can choose between four different standard color spaces (RGB, RGB Video, REC.709, and REC.601) or let the projector do it for you,
There are three standard color temperature settings (D6500, D7500, and D9300) plus a default setting, which senses the sync signal and refresh of the incoming video. Unfortunately, InFocus didn’t include a D5400 setting, which would be more appropriate for watching movies if and when they are transferred with that color temperature.
Don’t like the flesh tones you see? You can boost reds with a flesh tone compensation control (resist the temptation!), or correct white balance with RGB contrast and offset sliders. There’s also an adjustable noise reduction circuit with a multi-step slider that come sin handy with analog signal sources.
As mentioned earlier, you can save up to three different image parameters as macros and access them directly from the remote control. The Custom button on the remote displays all of the signal parameters for the input you’ve selected. Input selection is not random, but serial – the projector detects the next active input each time you push the Input button.
As for aspect ratios, there are five supported, some of which will automatically be selected depending on the incoming video or PC signal. The choices are Native, 16:9, 4:3, Letterbox, and Natural Wide. You can also teak the picture sync and horizontal/vertical picture size and position from the menu.
The projector supports all common SD and HDTV standards (480i/0, 720p, 1080i) but not 1080p. In PC mode, connected through the M1-DA adapter to my ATI Radeon X800 video card, I was able to view PC resolutions of 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, and 1920x1200. Most of them came up as 16x9 images, although the 1280x768 signal was half-size and required digital zooming (another function on the remote).
Figure 3. Plotted gamma curves in CRT, Film, and Video modes.
Note the abrupt clipping of each grayscale at 100 IRE.
Figure 4. The Play Big IN78 tracks a very clean grayscale from 10 IRE to 100 IRE.
ON THE TEST BENCH
The Play Big IN78 has an unusual feature — it can self-calibrate for best grayscale and black levels, according to the manual. All you need to do is to display a pattern or still image with about 50% black, then select the Auto Black Level function. In practice, it didn’t work all that well, showing both the 2% and 4% bars on a PLUGE pattern and resulting in a washed-out dark gray, not a rich black.
I’d have expected better, particularly since this projector uses a DarkChip3 DMD. Fortunately, I was able to do my own calibration and get those blacks down where they needed to be, resulting in a brightness measurement of 460.5 ANSI lumens (zoom lens set to its midpoint). Brightness uniformity averaged 88% corner to corner.
Contrast measurements were excellent at 549:1 ANSI and 968:1 peak. (That’ll teach me to trust an auto black level menu option.) The IN78 tracks an amazingly tight grayscale with a maximum shift in color temperature of just 135 degrees (read that again) from 10 IRE to 100 IRE. That’s outstanding performance for any type of display.
Since none of the gamma settings are expressed numerically, I decided to plot them myself using Colorfacts 6.0 software. “CRT” actually worked out to be 1.78, while “Film” had a shallower curve at 1.6 and “Video” was 1.63. None of these setting is even close to a cinema-like gamma, which should be around 2.4 to 2.8, depending on how deep you like your low gray levels.
The IN78 also had a serious flaw in the way it rendered a grayscale, flattening out abruptly at 100 IRE no matter which gamma setting I selected. To reduce this “white crush” effect (seen in Figure 3), I had to dial back the brightness by 20% or so, but couldn’t get rid of it completely.
Even though the IN78 clips the high end, it tracks a clean grayscale, as seen in Figure 4. One hallmark of DLP technology is its ability to deliver that tight, neutral color of gray from black to white. The IN78 had a maximum color shift of 458 degrees from 10 IRE to 100 IRE, doing better with low grays than a few projectors I’ve tested.
How about the actual color gamut? Figure 5 shows the IN78’s gamut plotted against the REC.709 color space. Here, the projector comes up a bit short, particularly in the green channel. Although the coordinates for yellow, cyan, and magenta are almost dead-on, the undersaturated green and blue pull those targets (and red) out of kilter. Still, the available color values results in about 85% coverage of the REC.709 space.
Figured 5. The IN78’s plotted color gamut compared to the REC.709 standard gamut.
VIDEO QUALITY
For image quality tests, I played a few HD DVDs from Toshiba’s HD-A2 player to ring out the IN78. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a natural to test color saturation, while Batman Begins provided the black level crunch test. The Realta HQV HD DVD showed what the Pixelworks DNX processor could do, and the standard-definition version provided insight into 480i processing.
First off, the IN78 has some bandwidth issues. It started to fill in the luminance test pattern from my AccuPel generator with an 18 MHz 720p pattern, and the 37.5 MHz burst was almost solid gray. 1080i results were a bit better with a clean 18 MHz pattern and some banding at 37.5 MHz.
The 480i processing also leaves something to be desired, as the IN78 failed several Realta HQV tests including the rotating bars, waving flag, small bars, and mixed cadences. It did OK with video titles superimposed over 3:2 film content, and locked up the 3:2 sequence very quickly from Super Speedway. The noise reduction circuit helped quite a bit with conventional noise and motion noise.
Results with 1080i content were quite different, as the HD DVD rotating bars were clean as a whistle. The video and film resolution tests looked perfect — no flicker or jitter, not even in the sequence where a camera slowly pans across Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. Yes, the IN78’s 1080i de-interlacing and motion compensation is actually better than its 480i performance!
Charlie was a delight to watch, although the image wasn’t quite as crisp as I’d expect and in fact wasn’t substantially sharper than the 480i DVD version. Even though the IN78 does process both fields in each 1080i frame, its 720p downconversion softens the image. The colors inside the factory (dig that Oompa-Loopa red!) had excellent saturation except for greens, which looked more vivid on my regular Mitsubishi HC5000 LCD projector.
The black levels in Batman Begins were very deep, but the projector comes out of black too fast in every gamma mode for cinema viewing. The result is lighter grays where you expect to see darker grays, resulting in lighter colors in shadow details. There should be at least one deep gamma setting on this projector — the existing CRT setting is about as deep as it gets, and that’s not even enough to watch video.
CONCLUSIONS
InFocus’ IN78 is an interesting product. It excels in many areas of image quality and could do even better with some software tweaks at the factory. The crushed whites on each grayscale I plotted are a major problem and the “flat note” I alluded to at the beginning of this review. Bear in mind, the grayscales were clipping even with the projector’s brightness and contrast set only halfway!
The color performance is good, although more green saturation is needed. The disparity between 480i and 1080i processing is just downright bizarre, and I’d recommend using a good outboard scaling DVD player instead for showing standard DVDs. Most new HD DVD and Blu-ray players have 1080p output, obviating any problems at the high end.
This projector faces two big problems — it offers only 1280x720 resolution, and its suggested retail price of $3499 is far too high for a 720p projector. Epson and Mitsubishi already have full 1920x1080 LCD imaging with decent 1080i processing for just a few hundred dollars more, and you can expect a few more such products to show up at Cedia this year. (Maybe InFocus will have a 1080p version out by then!)
