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Let’s not beat around the bush: TVs are great, but for the proper movie experience you need a projector, in a dark room, with an epic surround-sound system. Because that’s the way to enjoy a really good film — it’s even the way to enjoy a bad film. The problem is that projectors are rarely cheap, so when we heard about the InFocus X10, which will set you back a very reasonable £1,099, we started to have dreams of a home cinema all of our own.
The X10 is a really smart-looking DLP projector that claims to be able to deliver a native contrast ratio of 2,500:1, or 7,500:1 with the iris turned on. The headline feature has to be that you’ll be able to play games and watch movies in lovely 1080p quality. Now if that’s not something to get exited about, we don’t know what is.
You also get a 2m HDMI cable, which is handy, although it might not be quite long enough for people determined to ceiling-mount the projector. There are also a surprising amount of connection options too, including HDMI, DVI, component, composite and S-Video inputs.
To help projector novices, the X10 will pretty much set itself up, adjusting its own colour gamut and black levels. If you want to get the best out of it you can have it calibrated professionally, and then you can make use of the day and night modes, which should help your lamp last a little bit longer.
Indeed, problems start to arise when you consider the aforementioned lamp will only last around 2,000 hours. While that’s a fair bit of viewing time, it’s nowhere near the 100,000-hour rating of a good plasma, and replacement bulbs cost many hundreds of pounds. It wouldn’t put us off buying one, but it would certainly stop us watching Coronation Street on it and wasting our precious hours.
The X10 also comes with a two-year guarantee for the unit itself and a six-month lamp replacement scheme, which no doubt carries some fairly substantial conditions. You can buy one now, and a quick sniff around the Internets informed us that you can already get it for less than £1,000. –Ian Morris
