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Projectors offer quite a lot of bang for their buck, and here’s one of the best value we’ve seen for a while. For just £500, the X9 will produce a 720p picture from its native 16:9 DLP chip and also has a short throw lens, so if your room isn’t that big, you’ll still get a decent sized image (27 inches at a distance of 1 metre).
InFocus claims that you’ll get about 1,800 lumens of brightness from the projector, and a contrast ratio of about 2500:1. It also reckons you’ll see as many as 1.07 billion colours pouring out of the glass bit at the front. Crumbs — we didn’t know there were that many colours!
Connectivity isn’t bad either. You get a single HDMI 1.3 socket which can accept and process video up to 1080i. It’s likely, if you mount this projector on the ceiling, that you’ll want to invest in a nice long HDMI cable, although some will cost half as much as this projector. There are also component, composite, VGA and S-video inputs for any analogue sources you’ve got knocking around.
Happily the X9 will focus itself, but for keystone adjustment, digital zoom and other picture adjustments, you get a small, credit card remote control to prevent accidents resulting from toppling off a chair while trying to tap buttons on the machine itself.
With projectors, replacing the lamp is usually an Achilles heel, generally costing a decent percentage of what the projector cost initially. It’s not too bad on the X9, costing around £120. Still not cheap, but not outrageous either. InFocus claims a bulb should last around 4,000 hours with normal use.
The InFocus X9 will be available from October and will come with a six month bulb replacement guarantee and a two year parts and labour warranty. -Ian Morris
