TechRadar Verdict
Its size and throw are a bit impractical, but it offers stunning HD video clarity and performance
Pros
- +
Amazing HD clarity
- +
Gorgeous natural colours
- +
Deep blacks and dark colours
Cons
- -
Very long throw distance
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We've been waiting a long time for a 1,080p projector to call our own, but so far they've either cost the wrong side of a holiday in Mauritius, or offered a screen image akin to having your eyeballs attacked with Brillo pads.
Not exactly a pleasant experience either way. So along comes long standing projector manufacturer InFocus with its fancy-dan new X10 projector, claiming it's all pretty good 'n' like and costs around a thousand pounds.
Our initial reaction is that it's a big bugger – at almost 7kg it's certainly aimed at the installation market and this is backed up by the projector's long throw ratio of around 2:1. This means that for every foot of screen it has to be two feet away. You'll need a big room for cinema-sized pictures.
While we could bemoan the poxy 1.2:1 zoom lens, we can't complain about the connections. From HDMI, M1-DVI, VGA D-Sub to composite, component and S-Video – almost everything is covered. Firing up this behemoth, we selected its Eco mode for a quieter life, as it generates 30dB of sound and that's a touch louder than we'd like.
The business end
On getting down to business we instantly fell in love with this 1,080p projector connected to a Media Centre over HDMI. The image clarity is perfection itself, it somehow sucks out every last detail from each pixel. All the grain, noise and colour can be seen in older movies, while the colour soaked Kung-Fu Panda looks beautiful.
Shifting to test cards it's clear to see why – the X10 is one of the few devices to display the test colour gradients in their entirety, without saturation at either the dark or bright ends. This is partly down to its excellent and comprehensive colour controls, offering full temperature and unusually, gamut options.
By default many devices have 'red push' to suit the US market, which seems to favour overly-saturated reds. But the X10 enables you to choose a true RGB colour mode for entirely natural colours.
For enhanced black there's a dynamic iris, enabling you to drop the brightness and boost the contrast, though we felt comfortable with a fairly high setting, around the 70 mark.
Switching to SD content through the S-Video port the performance is still exceptional, there's a tiny amount of motion judder on full-frame pans and the projector struggled on occasion when the picture lacked dark colour information. But DVD scaling was excellent and colour clarity was otherwise highly adept for the source material.
The rainbow effect is also kept to a minimum thanks to the seven-segment wheel and balances out what really is a near perfect Full-HD projector.
