[Editor's note: this review is excerpted from John's write-up of the 2004 Projector Expo.]

Since so many people wanted to see the InFocus ScreenPlay 4805 and the Studio Experience 2HD (Sanyo Z2 clone) head to head, we spent some extended time with the two pieces right after the 4805 solo presentation.

First, high definition. On brighter scenes, the 2HD clearly had more detail than the 4805, just like we experienced with the 4805 vs the HD DLP units. The 2HD did have quite a few more picture artifacts, however - vertical banding was pretty obvious on brighter scenes, and there was stairstepping and jagged edges on any smooth edged object that moved in a diagonal fashion across the screen (this was very obvious on the speedboat footage coming from the DVHS deck). In terms of contrast and smoothness, the 4805 was a clear winner - the image looked much more 3-D and had a pop that the 2HD lacked.

In defense of the 2HD - on HD material, the 2HD had a "hyper-sharp" quality that was appealing, sometimes even appearing sharper than the HD2 DLPs. I attribute this to the more visible pixel grid on the LCD projector, which gave everything a hard edge that some might find preferable to the smoother look of the DLP.


On DVD, both pieces looked fairly comparable on brightly lit scenes. We used SPIDERMAN for this comparison, as it has plenty of bright and dark scenes to evaluate. When we went to the scene where Peter Parker finds his uncle lying in the street after being shot by the carjacker, the 2HD looked much murkier than the 4805. In fact, this is where the most dramatic differences between the two projectors became clear. Everything on the 2HD in this sequence became a dark blueish grey murk, with very little definition between the background and foreground elements. The 4805, on the other hand, rendered the scene with far greater contrast and more vivid colors. As I mentioned before, the image was much more three dimensional looking on the 4805.

I have mentioned in previous posts that the Z2 and other LCD projectors do much better on this type of material with DVI than with component, so we took SPIDERMAN out of the Pioneer DVD player it was in and placed it into the Bravo D-2 (graciously lent to us by the previous day's Bravo D-2 winner). With DVI, the 2HD looked considerably better, mostly in the area of sharpness. The foreground and background elements were now considerably more distinct, but still did not even approach the color and contrast performance of the 4805.

I would say that there was no one at the shootout who preferred the image of the 2HD to that of the 4805, except possibly for brightly lit HD material. If there was someone there who preferred the 2HD, it is likely that they might have been afraid to speak up, since there was such a large vocal group of LCD bashers in the front row. Still, I don't think many of those present were necessarily DLP proponents until after they had seen the side by side comparisons.


One last note about "screen door" effect. As Brad pointed out, the term screen door is more applicable to LCD projectors, since even the higher resolution LCD projectors have the more pronounced pixel grid that gives you the "screen door effect". Lower resolution DLP projectors have less of a problem with visible pixel grid than they do with visible pixels, since the grid itself is considerably less visible. In comparing the 4805 with the 2HD, the visible pixels became invisible on the 4805 at about the same distance the pixel grid became invisible on the 2HD.