The utilitarian looking InFocus ScreenPlay 4805 is a very capable home theatre projector, provided that you’re looking for a projector mainly for home theatre use.
This is because when we projected something other than video the unit failed terribly.The text readability left something to be desired and in all the ScreenPlay 4805 was better at projecting a DVD than a PC desktop – including 3D gaming playback. Forget about projecting documents though – the ScreenPlay 4805 isn’t much chop at finer details but we did find high quality photographs were fine.
The unit throws quite a large image for a small distance though, and is capable of dominating your projection wall. While it’s not the brightest projector, a high contrast ratio and Texas Instrument’s DarkChip2 ensured that the dark black levels and greyscaling were great and the overall image quality was clear and vibrant.
Another advantage is the quietness and low heat-output of the 4805. Environmentally it’s a large-ish projector, but unobtrusive thermally and acoustically.
At $2499 this is at the upper echelons of our pricing range, but a rich feature-set (including D-Sub, DVI, Component, composite and S-Video inputs) raise its value.