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Home theatre is new star of the show

Carolyn Ong

If you want a real home theatre system that will blow your friends away, think projection. An LCD or a plasma television is nice, but even a 50-inch screen is not quite as impressive as watching the Battle of Helm's Deep projected against your living room wall.

But first, if you want a true cinematic experience at home, you must have space, control over the lighting conditions and about $70,000 to spare.

For $25,000, the InFocus System ScreenPlay 5700 projector will give you a viewing experience no LCD or plasma television at Fortress could rival.

The 5700 is a native 16:9 format projector using Texas Instrument's Matterhorn Digital Light Processing (DLP) chip, which has a physical resolution of 1,024x576 pixels.

The 5700 is rated at 1,000 ANSI lumens after optimisation for video, but is brighter than many competing units with the same rating. It has a 1,400:1 contrast ratio and a six-segment, 5x speed colour wheel that modulates the light.

One of the best projectors in the XGA class, it has Faroudja DCDi video processing which handles the interlaced inputs and is bypassed when using progressive scan.

This unit will accept component and RGB HDTV 1,080p, 1,080i, 1,035i and 720p. It also displays EDTV 480p and 576p, as well as interlaced component, composite and S-video. A separate DVI/HDCP interface will allow input of digital and encrypted digital video. The 5700 has a 1.38x manual zoom and focus lens with a relatively long throw ... which is why you need a fairly big room. A 100-inch diagonal 16:9 screen can be filled from a distance of between 13.6 and 19.3 feet. For this review, the 5700 was set back at 14 feet, giving a 100-inch picture.

Colour accuracy and saturation, a weak point of many DLP projectors, is virtually perfect on the 5700. Colour on this unit is beautiful, and saturated reds could not be more perfect. This is especially apparent in colourful animation films such as Finding Nemo and Toy Story.

The 5700 is constructed in the same casework as the more expensive and higher resolution Screenplay 7200 and 7205. The cooling system produces audible noise. Setup was easy. It is genuinely 'plug and play' with little or no calibration needed as the factory presets are so close to ideal that messing with them will only diminish the picture quality.

If you have had some experience setting up home theatre projectors, you will know that not all are easy to set up.

The weakness in DLP projectors is usually the black levels but the 5700's 1,400:1 contrast delivers solid black levels and excellent shadow detail. Scaling is precise and clean.

The 5700 produces a detail-rich image that surpasses all but a few projectors I have seen in any resolution class. Using DVI hooked to a Marantz 8400 DVD player with a progressive scan output of 480i, the images are so colourful and vivid, they seem to jump out at you.

InFocus System ScreenPlay 5700

Specifications

Price: $25,000

Pros: Excellent picture; bright even with some ambient light; easy to set up; smooth, stable performance

Cons: Long throw distance and some noise from the cooling system

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