21. Projecting Pure Emotion

• ScreenPlay 5000 LCD...
• • PowersellerNYC
  • $1199.00

That's the slogan Infocus uses in its literature. The surge of emotion certainly didn't come from looking at the SP 5000, with its austere and somewhat old-fashioned appearance. Would it come suddenly when we plugged the unit in? Well, yes, it did - when the fan started up. At first we thought it must be in high-power mode, but no, there was no other adjustment available on the menu. Even changing video modes to Cinema or Entertainment didn't change the fan speed. Compared to the models it competes with, the SP 5000 had the worst score in the noise department, with levels like you used to hear two years ago.

We then connected the unit to our DVD players via the M1 and YUV connections and did a little adjusting via the menu. It's fairly traditional, with adjustments for contrast, brightness, sharpness, color correction, gamma (RGB), and so forth. In the installation menu, though, is a very handy automatic keystone correction function, which corrects distorted images so that you don't have to fiddle with the remote control.

We launched our test patterns, and experienced some more emotion... The SP 5000 has a pronounced tendency to overemphasize reds, and it was very difficult to get deep blacks without sacrificing the overall brightness of the picture. The result was that we got either whites that looked gray and fairly deep blacks, or else brilliant whites but with blacks that looked almost gray. Those results aren't that surprising given the values Infocus specifies, but they're surely a handicap for home theater use.

To prove the point, we went straight to some of our more difficult test scenes, such as dark scenes from Hostage with Bruce Willis, very bright ones from the arena sequences in Gladiator, and ones with very bright colors from Monsters, Inc. With all of them, the performance was only average. Image sharpness was lacking, and sparkling was fairly visible, both via DVI and YUV. (Choose DVI over YUV, by the way, since it stabilizes the picture. Obviously you should avoid the S-Video and cinch inputs, but that's true with any projector.)

After a lot of adjustment we were able to reduce the defects to a minimum, but never eliminate them, regardless of the source and the content. So the unit is a poor bet for home theater use. On the other hand, for using a game console or watching TV, the SP 5000's high brightness is a positive factor. Even in a room that's not totally dark, it was very good.