InFocus doesn’t categorize projectors on its website by application. However, the company says that the InFocus IN118BB, part of the InFocus Genesis Series, was intended as an entry-level, cross-over model for home entertainment and for business or education use, much like the directly competitive ViewSonic PX701HD. With an MSRP of $699, and available on the web for closer to $500 at this writing, it’s also very much in the same league as the Optoma HD146X and BenQ TH585. Like all of these models, it offers a 1080p (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) native resolution and a high brightness rating, at 3,400 lumens in this case. It also delivers top-tier color accuracy for the price, and an unusually bright 3D mode.
Basics and Setup
The IN118BB pairs a 1,920-by-1,080 DLP chip with a 6-segment color wheel, using RYGCWB (red, yellow, green, cyan, white, and blue) panels. Adding a white segment to the primary colors is standard for DLP projectors meant for ambient light use, since it increases brightness. The cyan and yellow panels help compensate for the color errors the white light tends to cause, with the yellow in particular helping the IN118BB deliver a brighter yellow than many DLP projectors can manage.
Size, weight, and setup are all typical for this class of projectors. At 4 by 12 by 9 inches (HWD), and only 5.7 pounds, the IN118BB is light enough to carry from room to room if you choose not to set it up permanently, and easy to handle during setup. Simply point it at the screen, adjust image size with the 1.1x manual zoom if necessary, and focus. There’s also a digital zoom and a vertical keystone adjustment.
A welcome convenience, not always included at this price, is that there are two HDMI 1.4a ports. There’s also a USB-A port that can only be used to provide power to a streaming HDMI dongle. The distance from lens to screen at the maximum zoom setting was 9 feet, 5 inches for a 90-inch diagonal image.
The Enhanced Gaming mode brought the input lag down to 16.4ms, a level that most gamers will be satisfied with. The 10-watt onboard mono speaker delivers high enough volume to fill a large family room, but with notable distortion at high volume. As with most projectors, if you want stereo or better sound quality, plan on using an external sound system.
Good Default Color Accuracy, Easily Tweaked
The IN118BB earns lots of points for good color accuracy and more for good shadow detail (showing details based on shading in dark areas), while just skating by on contrast and black level. The menus offer six picture modes: Bright, Dicom SIM, Movie, Presentation, sRGB, and User. Dicom SIM is irrelevant for home use but is common in crossover models. It’s meant for medical imaging, such as x-rays, in education applications.
If you’ve set the projector for any of the first five modes and make any change, the modified version automatically becomes the new User mode. So unless you’re willing to change settings every time you switch modes, you can modify only one mode with your preferred settings, and are limited to the default settings for the rest.
For business and education applications, any of the modes other than Dicom SIM can deliver vibrant, saturated color. However, Presentation has the best balance between brightness and color accuracy.
For video, the clear winner is Movie mode, which delivers the most accurate color and best shadow detail straight out of the box. You can also improve the color even more, at the expense of a little brightness, by adjusting the Brilliant Color setting. Each step down from the default 10 to 1 improves color accuracy just enough to notice. I picked 7 as a good compromise, but even at 10 the color accuracy was more than acceptable by most people’s standards.
The sRGB mode is slightly brighter than Movie and has near-equivalent color quality, making it a good choice when ambient light is a little higher than Movie mode can stand up to. The Presentation and Bright modes are even brighter, but both tend to make most colors look darker than they should, and Bright mode adds a noticeable green shift, as is common with the brightest modes in most projectors. Most people will consider even Bright to be tolerable for occasional use, such as on a particularly sunny day in a room with a lot of windows.
None of the modes offers a truly dark black level, which means that dramatically dark scenes won’t have a satisfyingly dark black, good sense of contrast, or sense of three-dimensionality if you turn the lights out. But the black is dark enough that you won’t notice an issue when watching in ambient light, which tends to wash out black levels with any projector. For scenes dominated by mid-tones, the contrast looks good even in a dark room.
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Based on the most common rules of thumb for image brightness in ambient light, the IN118BB’s 3,400-lumen rated brightness would be enough to light up a 150-inch, 1.0-gain, 16:9 screen in moderate ambient light. But keep in mind that the modes with better color accuracy aren’t as bright. For formal testing in a dark room, Movie mode was easily bright enough for a 90-inch image on a 1.0 gain white screen. In a family room at night with lights on, it was bright enough to deliver an 80-inch image with nicely saturated color, and to also be quite watchable during daytime.
For 3D, the IN118BB supports DLP-Link glasses and offers only one 3D picture mode, which is typical for entry level projectors with Full HD 3D. However it stands out for delivering a much brighter image than most. I didn’t see any crosstalk in my tests, and 3D-related motion artifacts were less obvious than with many 3D projectors.
As with any DLP projector, the IN118BB can show rainbow artifacts (red-green-blue flashes). But I see these artifacts easily and noticed only a few, so even if you’re sensitive to them, you might not find them annoying. That said, it’s still best to buy from a source that allows returns without a restocking fee, so you can judge it for yourself.
Well Worth the (Discounted) Price
The InFocus IN118BB is one choice in a group of closely matched projectors that also includes the BenQ TH585, the Optoma HD146X, and the ViewSonic PX701HD. Between them, the HD146X has the darkest black, an advantage for viewing with lights off. However, it also has only one HDMI port, which can be a problem if you want to use more than one video source. The Optoma and ViewSonic models offer picture modes that can give you an edge in gaming, but that won’t matter if you’re not a gamer.
The InFocus IN118BB has the advantage of an unusually bright and well rendered 3D image. It’s also one of the least expensive in the group. Added to its good color accuracy and overall image quality, that’s enough to make InFocus IN118BB Genesis a bargain if you find it on sale, which isn’t difficult. It’s a solid choice for a wide variety of home and educational uses.
