Projector Reviews

The so-called Resize control provides aspect-ratio selection (including a Native position that displays the image as received, with no resizing). Degamma provides gamma settings for Film, Video, or Computer images. Auto Color Gain provides different color-temperature settings, including a User setting in which the red, green, and blue are separately adjustable. There is no service menu (at least not one that InFocus would reveal), so these controls, which adjust the overall levels of their respective colors in the User mode, are the only means of custom-calibrating the projector's color temperature.

All of the onscreen menus are called up either from controls on the top of the projector or on the compact, non-illuminated remote. The remote was a bit balky: It didn't respond when I attempted to bounce the control signal off the projection screen, a round-trip distance of about 25 feet. It would sometimes work if I aimed it at the ceiling, but was most reliable when pointed directly at the projector.

The interaction of control menu and remote was frustrating. To make a change, you have to call up the desired menu, scroll down to the appropriate line, push the Menu/Select button (the menu flickers briefly, indicating that the function is now primed to receive your command), make the change, push Menu/Select again, scroll back up to the Exit line, then hit Menu/

Select yet again, as many times as it takes to back out of the menu structure. I often found myself madly pushing a navigation button to scroll back up to the exit line, only to realize that I'd forgotten to push Menu/Select again after I'd finished the adjustment. If you don't do this, you remain locked in the function you've just worked with and can't exit the menus.

Another annoyance was that the Video Control menu covers much of the screen while you're trying to make adjustments. You have to make an adjustment, exit the menu to have a look at what you've done (I've just told you how tedious that can be), then go back into the menu if further adjustment is required.

Like most video projectors, the 110 requires a cooling fan. Like most DLPs, it also uses a rapidly rotating color wheel. Both are potential noisemakers, but the InFocus was reasonably quiet. I sat within 2 feet of it during most of my testing and was bothered by noise only twice. On both occasions, the fan kicked into a higher mode for no obvious reason, stayed there for a few seconds, then returned to normal. It did this only when projecting test patterns, not films.

I tested two samples of the ScreenPlay. A few days after setup, the first began cycling randomly among inputs, without locking on to any of them. This caused the controls to freeze. To shut down the projector, I had to pull the plug—not recommended, since in this and all similar projectors the fan is designed to keep operating for a few minutes after use to gradually cool down the hot bulb. The projector then failed to come back on; whenever I plugged it in, it responded only with a rapid clicking noise accompanied by the flashing of several LEDs on the top of its case. The second sample worked fine. It broke lock on the input once, but that was because the DVD player shut off.

Onscreen
I was, in many ways, blown away by the performance of the ScreenPlay 110, but before I get to the good stuff I'll begin with my reservations. First of all, too much light spilled out of the projector from its ventilation holes. Some of this was toward the front, and while it never fell directly on the screen in my setup, it was still very distracting. There was also a different sort of stray light: that halo of gray that surrounds the active image area in all non-native 16:9 fixed-pixel projectors I have seen. It reduces the picture's subjective contrast, a sacrifice that DLP projectors really can't afford. To reduce the halo's annoyance level, I recommend that you surround your screen with a black border extending 1-2 feet in all directions.

The 110 has a two-position Overscan control. With this in its Normal setting (blue), the overscan was close to 0% at the left, right, and bottom, but 4% on top—not symmetrical, but acceptable. Except for one thing: The overscan at the top kept the 16:9 image from fully filling the screen with a 16:9 source. That is, when a 16:9 image was centered on the screen vertically and zoomed to fill the screen from left to right, there were black bars 1-2 inches thick on top and bottom. I could zoom the image out to eliminate them, but was then left with slivers of the image at the left and right that extended beyond the screen area.

When I engaged the Overscan control (green), it increased the overscan to 3% left, 4.5% right, 3.5% top, and 2.5% bottom. This cropped off more of the picture, but provided a shape that better fit the screen without spillover. Neither option was entirely satisfactory, but in both, the geometry of the image itself was fine: neither squeezed nor stretched.

Despite the 110's six-color, 4x color wheel, I found its rainbow artifacts quite visible on some material. (The rainbow effect, a problem with single-chip DLP projectors, results when the rotation of the color wheel interacts with the characteristics of the eye. It is visible as instantaneous flashes of multicolored light, usually triggered by voluntary or involuntary eye movements.) Rainbows generally occur most often near bright areas in otherwise dark scenes, but are rarely visible with brightly lit material.) I found the rainbows from the ScreenPlay more obvious than with the Plus Piano HE-3100, but less than with the Yamaha DPX-1 (reviewed in SGHT, October 2001).