December 2003 Reviewed by Wes Marshall	InFocus ScreenPlay 7200 DLP Projector

Description Model: ScreenPlay 7200 Price: $7999 USD Dimensions: 13.8"W x 4.3"H x 12.8"D Weight: 8.9 pounds Warranty: Two years parts and labor  Features Texas Instruments Mustang HD2 chipset	Features (cont'd) Faroudja DCDi FLI2300 processing chip 1280x720 resolution 1000 ANSI lumens brightness 1400:1 contrast ratio 16.7 million colors Proprietary auto-calibrating, six-segment, five-speed color wheel Factory-calibrated to D65 color mastering standards Eight selectable video inputs Front, rear, ceiling modes

In 1986, the year InFocus opened shop, its owners probably never thought that folks would want to use their projectors at home. Back then, projectors meant "slide" and "overhead," not "movie." That was before LCDs and DLPs offered a good, compact alternative -- if you wanted to show a film at home, you had to watch your 25" TV, or one of the mammoth CRT projectors from Kloss or Mitsubishi. But InFocus, which became one of the big players in display technology, stayed out of the early home-theater market. By 2001, however, someone at the company had decided it was time to make a move. As you’ll see, the decision not to rush to market allowed InFocus time to carefully design their products.

Nice package

When I received the ScreenPlay 7200, I was again struck how small and light the latest-generation DLP projectors are. Weighing less than nine pounds and with only a 13.8" x 12.8" footprint, this little gray box can fit almost anywhere. Of course, it’s what’s inside that counts, and InFocus hasn’t scrimped there. Texas Instruments’ Mustang HD2 chip (1280x720) is controlled by Faroudja’s FLI2300 DCDi chipset. InFocus uses all the power of the Faroudja, including 3:2 pulldown correction, color and sharpness enhancement, noise reduction, and scaling.

The 7200 is a light cannon, with the claimed ability to throw 1000 ANSI lumens at a 1400:1 contrast ratio. That abundant light is produced by a $500 lamp rated at 2000 hours of use. All this is contained in a box that looks somewhat bland, but that’s a blessing for folks who don’t want to make their electronics the artistic centerpiece of their home-decorating strategy. The 7200 arrived in a well-protected box and came with a cogent and comprehensible manual.

Setup was quick and effortless. You can mount the ScreenPlay 7200 on the ceiling or a table, it can be used as a front or rear projector, and its manual zoom lens permits easy placement -- I could place it anywhere from 12 to 17 feet from my 100" screen. I used the 7200 as a rear projector, mounted on a tabletop with the bottom of the projector level with the bottom of my screen. Leveling and pitch were easy to tweak with two adjustable feet. Fine-tuning the picture was manual but very precise.

The 7200’s connectivity is a dream. In fact, there were enough connections that I didn’t have to use my processor as a switching box. The 7200 provides two component RCA inputs, a D5 component input, two S-video inputs, and a composite input. Digiphiles will be happy to see a DVI-with-HDCP input. For most people, this is all the switching you could ever ask for. I was able to plug in two DVD players, my TiVo, and a VCR, with inputs left over. And there’s a nice gift from the design engineers: cycling through the inputs doesn’t have to take forever because, during setup, you specify which inputs are alive and which are dead.

The remote fit easily in my hand and had a nice reddish backlight for the buttons. Unfortunately, the button names are not backlit, so you have to learn what the symbols on the buttons mean. But even without backlighting, the remote’s layout makes it easy to learn and use in the dark. The remote also has a few nice touches I haven’t seen elsewhere: The Blank button gives you a filled blue screen, very handy for getting the positioning correct during setup. And, in a bow to the real world’s surplus of poorly broadcast and mastered images, InFocus lets you control both brightness and contrast directly from the remote, without ever having to dig deep into a menu. Those with the knowledge and experience to delve into the control system will find it easy to get to and, thanks to InFocus’s very intuitive graphic user interface (GUI), simple to use.

The factory set it up correctly!

I used the Video Essentials test DVD to set up the ScreenPlay 7200’s picture. Contrast, color, brightness, and tint ended up within ±2% of the factory settings. In fact, the 7200 had one of the best "out of the box" pictures I’ve seen. Perfectionists will find abundant advanced settings, but I’d leave most of those to the professionals. A few items do deserve your attention, however. First, the True Life setting routes all standard-definition interlaced signals through the Faroudja circuitry and activates chroma and luma detail. It’s worth using to get the best picture. Watching DirecTV or TiVo recordings using True Life looked both cleaner and more detailed. You can also manually set 3:2 pulldown correction. Finally, though you can set the color temperature to one of three settings, stick with 6500K for best performance.

Next, I made fine adjustments to the keystone, which showed some weird anomalies that prompted a call to tech support. The keystone should have yielded what are called in geometry "congruent trapezoidal patterns," leading to a perfectly rectangular image. Instead, no matter how carefully I ensured that the 7200 was square to the screen, when the picture from a DVD or satellite channel had four 90-degree angles, the onscreen menu looked like a trapezoid. Tech support was quick and gracious, but it took us a while to develop a mutually understandable language. The final solution was to square up the picture and leave the menu misshapen. Only an annoyance, but given the overall excellence of the 7200, a surprising one.

Time to try some DVDs. First up was 2001, with its breathtaking sunrise shots. The brightness of the picture was stunning, far in excess of any projector I’ve ever used. Despite the brightness, I never felt there was a problem with the contrast. Blacks were as good as those of any digital projector I’ve used, and better than my aging Runco Cinema 750 CRT. The colors weren’t quite as brilliant as the Boxlight Studio Experience 20HD’s, but in many ways looked more realistic. Watching Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (aka Spirited Away), my wife actually gasped at how beautiful and life-like the colors were in the scene where Chihiro and Haku walk through the flower maze. The weird colors in P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love had the desired disorienting effect.

In Rabbit-Proof Fence (a film that touched my soul -- don’t miss it), the Australian outback is photographed with wonderful texture among its million shades of brown. The 7200 caught the heat of the oppressive sun and the detail in the dry, cracked earth. The skin tones of the Aboriginal children were gorgeous; I could tell director Phillip Noyce had fallen completely under the spell of these beautiful and intelligent children. The 1080i JVC D-VHS version of U-571 looked like film. Given the fact that the 7200’s Faroudja circuitry had to scale the picture from 1080i to 720p, I was expecting some minor artifacts. I saw nothing but a clean picture.

I was also curious to see how well the 7200 would handle 480i material. Live broadcasts from DirecTV looked fine, with no breakup. Occasionally, when TiVo’s adaptive speed control dropped into low gear, there was some breakup in the picture, but it never lasted long enough to be troubling. Even Faroudja circuitry needs a certain amount of signal strength to work.

There was one significant problem with standard-definition TV. We were watching some football in standard definition, and I tried using the ScreenPlay’s Natural Wide aspect-ratio setting to fill the screen with a 4:3 image. I don’t recommend this setting. The sides became distorted and misshapen, like panning a scene with an exaggerated fish-eye lens. When I reset the projector to normal 4:3 or letterbox, the image was again pristine.

I never saw DLP rainbows with the 7200 unless I tried to make them happen by darting my eyes all around the screen.

Which is the best?

Over the last year I’ve had a parade of projectors through my home, and the InFocus 7200 beats all of them. The Boxlight Studio Experience Cinema 20HD threw a rich and colorful picture, but it had a problem in my theater that required that I defocus it to the extent that it no longer had the look of high definition. The Cinema 20HD’s price has fallen from $9999 to $8999, but InFocus has just announced a price reduction on the 7200, to $7999. Advantage InFocus.

The other projectors I’ve looked at recently use TI’s Dual Mode DLP, which allows DVDs to be played with no scaling. The PLUS Avanti HE-3200’s price has also come down; it is now a bargain at $2999. Its older sibling, the PLUS Piano HE-3100, now costs only $1999; for someone who will watch mostly DVDs in a dark room and have no trouble placing the projector where it demands, the HE-3100 is one of the great bargains in home theater. Neither projector gives the pixel-fill ratio of the 7200, and neither can do as good a job with hi-def broadcasts -- but you can buy a lot of DVDs for $6000. The Boxlight Studio Experience 12SF had a nice picture, but they’ve held the price at $4999, which makes it uncompetitive.

Is it time to jump in now?

Texas Instruments has a new chip, the HD2+, that supposedly has better contrast; most manufacturers will have it in their projectors by the end of the year. InFocus has released the ScreenPlay 7205, with HD2+ chip, for $9999. TI has also come out with a three-chip DLP that should allow better contrast, higher brightness, and no rainbows. JVC is bringing the price down on its D-ILAs, and Sony has a new D-ILA-style chipset coming out. As usual, it seems as if something better and cheaper is just around the next bend.

So is it time to jump? That’s a decision you’ll have to make on your own, but I think now is a good time. The next big step will be an affordable chip that offers 1920x1080 resolution with even better blacks and lumens than are now possible. The tech world is moving fast, but my guess is we are still a few years away from seeing such a chipset.

For now, the InFocus ScreenPlay 7200 offers a stellar picture, superb brightness, and unflappable scaling and conversion. It’s easy to set up, simple to use, and provides a great picture right out of the box. I highly recommend the 7200, especially at its new, lower price.

Manufacturer contact information:

InFocus Corporate Headquarters
27700B SW Parkway Avenue
Wilsonville, OR 97070-9215, USA
Phone: (503) 685-8888, (800) 294-6400
Fax: (503) 685-8887

E-mail: info@infocus.com
Website: www.infocus.com

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