Movie Theater Video for the Masses

InFocus Screenplay 4805: Objective Tests With Factory Settings

Test Patterns

The Darkchip 2 chipset did a very good job, providing a very good contrast ratio. The blacks were visibly deeper than with an LCD projector and the whites weren't overly bright. The shades of gray were subtly rendered and the last value on the left was really black, to the point where it blended into the frame of the test pattern. The colors were slightly lacking in saturation, and the red and blue seemed a little more in evidence than the green, which appeared a bit pale.

You'll have to increase the sharpness to somewhere between very soft and very sharp to get contours that are a little cleaner. Finally, the circles were perfectly round; the projector's geometry seemed fine.

InFocus Screenplay 4805: Subjective Tests

As we saw with the test patterns, a few adjustments are necessary before starting the subjective tests. The goal is to correct the color imbalance in order to get the full benefit of the projector's quality.

Red: 52

Green: 50
Blue: 50
Colors: 53
Sharpness: sharper

Subjective Tests

Cover your eyes. In this excerpt, DLP technology showed its clear superiority to LCD (reader our backgrounder on projector technologies). The depth of the blacks was significantly better than anything we've seen so far. All details were visible with no problem. The Faroudja chipset does an excellent job. The sharpness of the image and the realism will impress you. This is one projector that produces quality. But be careful if you're sensitive to the rainbow effect, because you won't escape it here either. Even though it was less dramatic than with other projectors, it was still visible, and some people find that fatiguing. With the excerpt from Finding Nemo, the colors were bright and the image had exemplary stability. The ocean bottom looked more real than life, and it's a pleasure to see so much animation on the screen.

When screening Minority Report, the 4805 did a better job than an LCD projector. The whites weren't overly bright and the lights weren't blinding, and the black level remained very good. Even if the projector fell short of perfection in scenes like the raising of the prison tubes, it was very good indeed for this price range. The DLP technology was markedly better than the LCD technology with these movie excerpts. Finally, note that it's vital to adapt the size of your image to the distance from the screen. The matrix is an 848 x 480, and so it's preferable to be at a distance equal to approximately twice the screen horizontal in order to avoid a pixelation effect.

Before moving on to the tests with the Xbox console, we should note that the results we got in YUV seemed slightly better in terms of definition than in S-Video.