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InFocus ScreenPlay 110
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Digital Light Processing (DLP), a display technology developed by Texas Instruments, has been gaining in popularity both in the home-theater market and the Digital Cinema arena. Not only has the picture quality been getting better and better, but--at least in the home market--the prices have begun to drop sharply as compared to just a year ago. Enter InFocus. Until very recently, this large projector manufacturer had been concentrating solely on LCD technology for the professional market. Now it has turned its attention to the growing home scene with its ScreenPlay 110 projector. We're glad it did.
Small footprint
The company's first home-theater product is an 800x600 1-chip DLP projector. The ScreenPlay 110 is a dual-mode projector, which gives you 848x480 resolution for 16:9 wide-screen video and 800x600 for 4:3 video sources. Measuring just 10.4 by 11.1 by 3.3 inches and weighing only 6.7 pounds, the ScreenPlay 110 has an extremely small footprint. It's a compact, sleekly designed piece of equipment--mount this little package up on the ceiling and forget about it. The fan noise is reasonably low; if the ScreenPlay is on the ceiling and somewhat behind the seating area, the noise level shouldn't be objectionable.
The remote is also small--very small, in fact, with tiny buttons. However, this isn't a hindrance, as there's not much to control from the remote (more on features later). The power switch, the Menu/Select button, the arrow keys, and the Keystone correction keys are duplicated on top of the projector itself.
Fine tunes and features
The ScreenPlay 110's internal menu system (or GUI) is not the most user-friendly we've encountered. Unfortunately, when you're selecting an item to adjust, the entire menu system stays onscreen, making fine-tuning the picture a real hassle. To exit, you must reselect the item before it will let you scroll your way out of the menu, which is pretty awkward. In the features department, the ScreenPlay 110 is fairly low-frills, which is typical of most front projectors. The focus and zoom features are both operated manually by manipulating the lens. The ScreenPlay 110 is also capable of supporting multiple aspect ratios--4:3, letterbox, 16:9, and anamorphic--which allows you to use either a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect-ratio screen.
With the Enhanced Connectivity Module, the ScreenPlay 110 sports one set of analog component video inputs, one S-Video input, and one composite video input, which are all supported by a single set of stereo audio inputs. For computer use, you'll find a standard 15-pin VGA-style input and a M1-DA (DVI) input. There's also a 15-pin monitor output and an RS232 port for control by a Crestron, an AMX, or a similar automation system.
Faroudja video processing
As far as performance is concerned, the ScreenPlay 110 has a couple of features to recommend it. Faroudja video processing heads the list, with excellent 3:2 pull-down for cleaning up film-based sources (such as DVD) and Faroudja's patented DCDi circuitry for video-based material. The color decoding is also superb. The projector measured very close to the broadcast standard color temperature of 6500K but was a little plus-green on the top and the bottom of the grayscale. A full-blown calibration for both NTSC and HDTV produced excellent results. Red, green, and blue gain controls in the user menu helped us eliminate the plus-green color temperature with the use of our Philips Color Analyzer, which resulted in extremely accurate color reproduction. Watching chapter four of the Hollow Man DVD revealed a nicely resolved anamorphic DVD picture with an excellent color palette. The six-element 4X speed color wheel seems to work really well, as we couldn't detect any rainbow patterns with moving images. Also, HDTV pictures looked quite good based on what we saw from the HBO and Showtime HD feeds that our Dish Network satellite system delivered.
However, there are a couple of picture-quality issues with the ScreenPlay 110 that are endemic to all 4:3, 1-chip-based DLP projectors--namely black-level performance and visible low-level noise. Blacks are a really dark gray even when black level is set properly with a PLUGE test pattern, and low-level noise is visible on all sources no matter how low the sharpness control is set.
Despite those issues, the ScreenPlay 110 is one of the best-performing 800x600 1-chip DLP projectors we've tested to date, and its $4,999 list price is highly competitive in its category. For a first stab at the home-theater market, InFocus has scored with an excellent value. So if you're on a budget and want to get into the big-screen front-projection world, the ScreenPlay 110 is worth a look.
