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InFocus IN80 DLP Projector Review

Author John Archer
Published 17th Aug 2008
Manufacturer InFocus
Supplier CSE Solutions
Price £1,129.57 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed £1,299.00 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price Click here
Design Score 8 for Design
Features Score 8 for Features
Image Quality Score 9 for Image Quality
Value Score 8 for Value
Overall Score 8 for Overall
InFocus IN80 DLP Projector
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Continuing with our 30 Days of Night viewing test, the IN80's HD sharpness seems just as impressive as that of the X10, revealing details as fine as individual snow crystals, and every bit of oral unpleasantness missed by the vampires' clearly abysmal dentists. Both projectors have Full HD resolutions, and it shows.

In fact, the IN80 really only has a couple of serious performance problems: running noise, and the rainbow effect. The former finds the projector emitting quite a bit of racket from its cooling fans, even without the projector's ‘high power' mode selected. The only good news here is that the noise produced is, at least, pretty constant, rather than suffering with the sort of peaks and troughs sometimes heard on projectors using dynamic irises (as opposed to the IN80's manual one).


The rainbow effect, meanwhile, finds stripes of pure red, green and blue colour flitting around in your peripheral vision or over particularly bright image components - especially if the camera pans or your eyes flit across the screen.

On the IN80, possibly because of its slightly greater brightness, I actually spotted rainbowing marginally more often than I did on the X10. But honestly, it only crops up very rarely and very marginally for the vast majority of the time, and I for one still consider it an extremely small price to pay for all the video quality benefits DLP technology brings to the table. That is unless you happen to be one of those people who's particularly susceptible to seeing it, or you want to use an IN80 in a particularly small room, meaning that your eyes may need to rove over the image more than would be the case in a large room.

One other, thankfully avoidable issue worth mentioning concerns the projector's Brilliant Colour feature. For while this definitely does make colours look more vivid, it also ups the picture's noise levels exponentially and in my opinion is best avoided.

Verdict

The IN80 is undoubtedly a superb projector for its money. However, it is also to some extent a victim of the success InFocus has enjoyed with the X10. For while the IN80 is better than the X10, unless you're particularly keen to go down the custom install route or want the peace of mind of the extra warranty, for me it's not quite better enough to justify the extra £400.

 

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comment Chris de Hoedt said on 13th July 2009

IN80 projector performs exactly as reviewed, although I did not find the rainbow effect - perhaps I am less susciptable or the recent model March 2009 has reduced the rainbow effec... more

comment An o' Neamus said on 7th October 2009

I had a similar problem with the InFocus X10 and the new PS3 Slim. I solved it as follows:

To prevent the projector (Infocus X10) from switching away from source or ... more

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