InFocus IN82: 1080p Home Theater Projector Review – Image Quality

Posted on October 4, 2007 By Art Feierman

You will find that this section, on the IN82’s image quality, is organized into four sections:

Skin Tone Handling
Black Levels and Shadow Detail
Sharpness
Overall Picture (image) quality

InFocus IN82 Home Theater Projector: Skin Tones

The InFocus IN82 does a very good job on skin tones. After the minor adjustments I made to the grayscale, I found skin tones, overall, to appear very natural looking. The general tendency of most projectors is to end up with the skin tones just a little to contrasty, overall, giving you the feeling of a hard image. I’ve provided a number of images.

Quicktip: Images in this section

The second point is that these images are approximations, designed to support commentary. The reality is, there is no really go way that I am aware of to faithfully reproduce what the projector puts on the screen. My monitor, and yours are drastically inferior to the capabilities of a good projector (consider the high contrast and very dark black levels compared to a typical computer monitor, it’s like Ferrari, vs Kia. Even good digital SLR cameras can’t do the job. I know, I’m still trying to get my 2nd dSLR to produce something that’s moderately close.

Back to business. I’ll start with a couple of the usual frames from Lord of the Rings. These days, that movie, and Sin City, are now the last two non hi-def DVD images I am shooting. Everything else is now either Blu-ray (ok, an occasional HD-DVD), or HDTV sources.

On the image of Arwen above, this one looks very good. The actual screen image is a touch darker, but the proper image is always a little pale, and on the better projectors you can see the slight shift toward green toward her forehead, which fits with the location, a forest, with lots of reflected green.

I’m not sure this image from Sin City belongs here, nor the one below from Phantom, as both frames are artificially set. Sin City uses a lot of sepia tones and spot colors for it’s look, but still Nancy looks good here. You’ll find another frame, of her dancing later on, which will help you see what the director was doing with color. The other image, from the beginning of Phantom is “black and white”, just before the movie switches to color (we’re not in Kansas anymore).

Aeon (from Aeon Flux) (above) looked great in this sequence. This exposure I chose is a touch lighter than with most other projectors, but overall, her skin looks rich, and soft, under hard lighting. This is definitely of my favorite projectors when it comes to handling this scene.