DLA-RS35 vs. InFocus IN83 and SP8602

Posted on November 1, 2010 By Art Feierman

Let’s start with the InFocus SP8602 (SP is the short form for their old ScreenPlay name for home theater projectors, I assume).

I’m in the midst of the SP8602 projector as we speak. Actually I just shipped it back to them to check out a discrepancy. I’m measuring 570 lumens at “best” mode, and only 750 lumens in “brightest” mode (at the mid-point of the zoom). This InFocus loses more lumens as it goes from wide angle on the zoom (936 maximum to 750 at the mid-zoom point), and about 500 lumens in “brightest” mode, with the zoom at full telephoto.

The SP8602 has made a dramatic improvement in black level performance over the older IN83 (which was not good in that regard), still, it’s no match for the JVC. Period. It can’t keep up with the Epson UB projectors either. The InFocus seems to be more inline with the Panasonic PT-AE4000 and a little better than the LG CF181D or BenQ W6000 home theater projectors.

For most of the rest, I’ve pasted in the IN83 vs (older) DLA-RS20 competitor section (I’ve searched and replaced RS20 with RS35 from January). This is done for two reasons. First, I did a lot of still relevant side by side photos between the IN83 and the RS20. Since the picture quality of the RS35 is virtually the same as the RS20’s but for some minor improvement (including black levels), these images are close enough

Very interesting competition here. The IN83 is an excellent DLP projector with Darkchip4. The IN83 I have here still does the best overall color of any of the current 1080p projectors I’ve reviewed, doing our normal calibration. Even with the CMS settings we are using for the RS35 (and we didn’t do anything but grayscale balance, brightness, contrast and gamma, for the IN83), the InFocus still has the advantage in skin tones and overall color. It’s the kind of difference where the RS35 looks great, and everyone is happy, until put side by side with the IN83, then it’s – the RS35 looks great, but the IN83 does better.

That’s only until you hit the first dark scene, and the JVC RS35’s black levels just destroy the IN83’s best on those dark scenes. Black levels aren’t even close, as you can see from these three side by side images. The first is simply a black image (between scenes). Since neither projector uses a dynamic iris, what you see, is what you get. Remember we overexpose these images (to varying degrees) to make the differences easy to see (JVC is on the right side in all of these images):

Click Image to Enlarge

Next is a scene with almost no bright areas, from Men In Black. This is an excellent example of the difference in black level handling between these two. The first pair is more overexposed to show differences, the second is closer to what you will see on your screen: