PRODUCT REVIEW: APRIL 2,2008
InFocus IN83 1080P DLP Home Theater Projector
InFocus’ IN83 is a strong performer — but is it worth the price?
There’s been lots of change at InFocus over the past year, and apparently all for the good. The management team has been reorganized; the product line standardized, and some InFocus alumni have been brought back to right the ship after a series of product flops and financial mishaps over the past six years.
Now, InFocus is back in the game with a mix of mostly business DLP projectors (their bread and butter) and some new home theater models. The IN83 is the newest of them all, and is a single-chip 1080p design with many advanced features for imaging and calibration.
Figure 1. The IN83 resembles the flight deck of a famous starship.
OUT OF THE BOX
To say the IN83 has an unusual design is an understatement. The housing is quite large and features a semi-circular shape, measuring about 17 inches by 19 inches. This is clearly an installation projector and not something you’d haul out for friends on the occasional movie night.
The supplied lens is a fixed focal length type with manual focus and zoom and a relatively short throw ratio of 1.2:1, offset to the right of the projector. That bucks the current HT trend to go with longer throw lenses, which provide more flexible installations and better lens geometry. Images are also offset 36% above the top of the projector, as there are no mechanical lens shift adjustments.
The imaging device is a single 1920x1080 DMD using Texas Instruments’ DarkChip4 technology. The color wheel has seven segments, including two each of red and blue and three green segments. In addition, the projector incorporates BrilliantColor processing, which is supposed to increase overall color saturation. The IN83 can also take advantage of wider color gamuts encoded in the HDMI 1.3 transport stream, such as the xvYCC standard (IEC 61966-2-4).
Figure 2. The real panel is lettered upside down for inverted installation.
Note the pair of 12V triggers.
The input connectors, which are labeled to read right-side-up with an inverted ceiling installation, include one each of composite and S-video jacks, an RCA component video input, a single HDMI 1.3 jack, and the usual InFocus MD-1A connector that also doubles as a DVI jack. A 9-pin RS232 jack is included for remote control, and there’s a pair of 12V screen triggers — one marked “horizontal” and one marked “vertical.” (You can use the second control to operate an anamorphic lens assembly for 2.35:1 screens.)
REMOTE AND MENUS
InFocus’ remote controls have always been minimalist in design, and this one is no exception. There are only 13 buttons to fiddle with (plus power on/off) and only the button icons are backlit — not the text descriptions.
Fortunately, you’ll have direct access to three groups of inputs, with the projector automatically scanning through each group for the next active signal. In addition to the main menu, you can also directly access the image resizing function (actually the aspect ratio menu); image overscan, auto image set-up, and three User preset image memories.
In addition to the usual image adjustments, InFocus has included a plethora of tweaks. The five aspect ratios are 16:9, 4:3, Native (set by image resolution and sync), Letterbox, and Natural Wide. The Overscan button zooms the image to crop it by as much as 3%, or underscan it by 97%. (Of course, there’s a 1:1 pixel-mapping mode.)
The IN83 has five different gamma presets, starting with CRT and stepping through Film, Video, PC, and Daylight. I found all of them to have steeper gamma curves than expected (see test results). You can also play with color until the cows come home, with four choices in the Color Space menu (RGB, RGB Video, REC709, REC601) and five choices in the Color Gamut menu (Auto, SMPTE-C, EBU, REC709, and Maximum).
You can also turn BrillantColor on and off to suit your tastes, although you won’t see much of a difference in color saturation. Not enough color adjustments? You can also play with flesh tones, presumably to boost reds and yellows. I’d stay away from this control if the projector’s been calibrated — flesh tones should display correctly without any extra help.
The IN83 comes with an iris, something that appears to be superfluous at first glance. DLP projectors have long been known for their rich, deep blacks, so why bother? In the Iris menu, you can set the f-stop in increments of 9 from fully on to off. Note that, while black levels drop, so does overall image brightness.
Additional settings include a high power lamp mode, which boosts lamp brightness by about 20%, auto power on mode with detection of an active signal, and an automatic image-inverting mode that kicks in when the projector is turned upside down for installation.
For calibration, InFocus provides three preset color temperatures (6500, 7500, and 9300) plus a Native mode that works by looking at the signal format and color space coding. In essence, if you are watching HDTV programs, the defaults should be REC709 and 6500K. You can also set red, green, and blue gain and offset manually for each memory.
There are also ISF Day and Night modes for presets that can be recalled if the calibration is messed up or someone’s been playing with the menus. And InFocus’ Calibration Utility software package that allows direct setting of the red, green, and blue coordinates, using a color analyzer to read at the screen.
Two other settings that bear mentioning include a digital image offset for shifting images up and down the surface of the DMD. This could come in handy if you are watching a Cinemascope (2.35:1) movie and want to get rid of the letterbox bars at the bottom of the image with a screen mask. To make those bars as dark as possible, use the black level calibration feature.
Figure 3. This chart shows the S-curve uncorrected gamma (blue) in factory mode.
Reducing brightness by 25% stabilized and improved the IN83’s gamma response.
ON THE TEST BENCH
InFocus claims the IN83 “… is video optimized brightness up to 1600 Max ANSI lumens. The IN83 is bright enough to deliver film-standard, D6500K color accuracy in nearly any theater, even with ambient light or daytime viewing.” So I decided to plot the projector’s gamma curve using factory-standard brightness and contrast settings and the Film gamma preset. (The iris was turned off for all tests.)
The result is shown in Figure 3. While the projector was certainly bright enough (about 700 lumens), the plotted gamma curve flattened out noticeably at the top end of the grayscale, crushing whites above 80% values. So you really can’t run the IN83 flat-out and expect decent grayscale performance.
Trimming projector brightness to a more reasonable 495 lumens — still plenty bright enough for an 82-inch diagonal screen — resulted in the linear gamma curve also seen in Figure 3. Contrast numbers with the iris disabled were excellent, measuring 613:1 ANSI (average) and 850:1 peak. The highest contrast measurement was made in Standard mode using a 50.50 black/white pattern and clocked at 941:1.
Brightness uniformity was disappointing, but not unusual for a single-chip DLP design. To the average corner, uniformity measured 66%, which is decent. However, measured to the worst corner, uniformity dropped to 45%, resulting in a noticeable “hot spot” through ¾ of a full white image. Fortunately, white balance uniformity is excellent with a maximum shift of 510 Kelvin across that same white field.
Figure 4a. This RGB histogram for the IN83 shows RGB level consistency problems at 20 IRE.
Figure 4b. The IN83 tracks a very clean grayscale at 30 IRE and above.
It’s not surprising that color temperature tracking across a grayscale ramp is also consistent on the IN83, with a maximum shift of 103 Kelvin from 30 IRE to 100 IRE. What was surprising a large jump at 20 IRE to 7544K, almost 100 degrees cooler than the measurement at 50 IRE (6560 K). The reason for this isn’t clear, but the RGB levels histogram (plotted with ColorFacts 7.5 software) seen in Figure 4 clearly shows an upward spike in red and blue levels with a corresponding drop in green at 20 IRE. You’ll see how this affects image quality shortly.
As for color gamuts, I “swept” the IN83 twice — once with BrilliantColor switched off and the REC709 color space option selected, and once with BrilliantColor switched on and Maximum color space selected. Figures 5a and 5b show the results of the two plots compared to the BT709 standard gamut, while Figure 6 shows the IN83’s maximum gamut compared to the DCI standard (digital cinema) gamut.
Switching BrilliantColor on and off made very little difference to color saturation, based on my measurements. The yellow, cyan, blue and red points were close to ideal in either case, but magenta was off by quite a bit. Using the Maximum gamut improved blue saturation while pushing the green point higher and towards yellow. Cyan and red remained unchanged, while magenta shifted more towards red.
This exercise, by the way, shows one of the flaws in sequential color imaging. Correcting saturation and hue values for individual colors while maintaining accuracy for other colors and their luminance values is easier to do with three discrete color filters — one reason why three-chip DLP projectors work so well for digital cinema.
Figure 5a. Here’s what the IN83’s color gamut looks like with BrilliantColor shut off...
Figure 5b …and here’s what it looks like turned on. Not much of a difference, is there?
Figure 6. Even the projector’s Maximum color gamut setting
isn’t enough to cover the DCI color space.
IMAGE QUALITY
For my tests, I used selected scenes from Batman Begins and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on HD DVD, plus the Realta HQV red laser and blue laser test discs. I also indulged in a little coverage of the 2008 NCAA basketball tournament; thoughtfully broadcast in 1080i by local CBS affiliate KYW-DT at close to 18 Mb/s.
The Realta discs revealed that the IN83’s Pixelworks 10-bit DNX video processor was pulling its weight. It sailed through the standard-definition tests, picking up extremely quickly on 3:2 and other oddball frame/field sequences while leaving minimal interlaced scan line artifacts on the screen. The high-definition tests showed that full-frame 1080i processing was being performed, with no twitter in the video resolution and film resolution loss tests — just smooth 1080p.
Another pleasant surprise: The component video inputs showed excellent high frequency response, passing the 37.5 MHz luminance multiburst patterns at 720p and 1080i resolution from my AccuPel test pattern generator. If there’s detail in an HD program source, you’ll see it on the screen!
Because InFocus has trumpeted the low black levels and high contrast in this projector, I started my subjective image quality tests with the nighttime rescue and Batmobile chase sequence from Batman Begins just to see what the projector’s low-level grayscale rendering looked like. And it was impressive; except for some noticeable color mottling (posterization) that popped up on low-level images.
People’s faces appeared blotchy, shadows had a reddish-blue tint to them, and shadow gradients had a noticeable color shift. The culprit? That spike in red and blue energy at 20 IRE I mentioned earlier. And believe me, you’ll notice it when watching movies or TV shows with nighttime scenes.
Too bad, because there’s plenty of detail in all HD images, thanks to 1080p resolution and excellent frequency response. As for color rendering, flesh tones and other color shades with mixes of red and yellow looked natural, not forced. (Get your hands off that flesh tone adjustment!) Blues could have used a little more pop, though.
As expected, Charlie really showed well, particularly the scene where the contest winners enter the factory for the first time and see those unearthly greens, yellows, blues, and reds. But once again, the color mottling showed up in shadows and in Charlie’s run-down shack of a house. For best results, pop in an animated feature like Ratatouille and enjoy colors that really pop — but watch out for shadows in the nighttime scenes.
As for live sports, the IN83 did an outstanding job. DMDs switch at speeds sufficient to show the starship Enterprise moving at Warp Factor 5, so you don’t need to worry about motion blur of any kind. I watched the Villanova Wildcats upset Clemson’s Tigers in the first round and it felt like I was seated about 20 rows from the court — that’s how good picture quality is.
CONCLUSIONS
InFocus’ IN83 is quite the enigma. On the one hand, it has excellent frequency response, high contrast, and strong color performance. On the other, it has noticeable brightness uniformity issues, flattens grayscales easily at high brightness levels, and there’s that “hiccup” in the grayscale at 20 IRE that creates unpleasant color shading issues.
The factory gamma settings measure much higher than they should, with Film mode coming in at 3.0 and Video at 2.6, but you can work around that with trial and error. BrilliantColor has little noticeable and measurable effect (if any) on color saturation, and blue is undersaturated in all modes except Maximum.
There’s a lot to like about this projector, but given the issues I’ve raised, I can’t see spending $6,000 for the IN83, not when you consider the comparative color and grayscale performance of lower-priced 3LCD units and JVC’s comparably-priced LCoS DLA-RS series projectors. While they may not be as bright, brightness isn’t everything as you’ve just seen.
As for the IN83’s low black levels, they can be impressive, but if a projector has trouble coming out of black cleanly (and this one does), then they don’t mean much, either. I’d prefer to see InFocus tame the beast and optimize this projector for best overall grayscale and color performance somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 lumens. It shouldn’t be a difficult task.
