Posted on April 6, 2018 By Lyle Silverman
InFocus IN2128HDx Projector Review – Performance: Brightness, Contrast, Audible Noise
Though I was not expecting perfect performance in the brightness department for the IN2128HDx, I was hoping for a little bit better than what was measured.
At full lamp power, in bright mode and wide zoom, the IN2128 turned in a measurement of 2752, a 31% reduction from the manufacturer’s claim of 4000 lumens. While this is generally not good and well below what you would typically hope for and expect, around a 10-15% reduction, it is within range of other projectors on the market when it comes to the difference between the claimed and actual lumens.
When you turn the projector’s low lamp brightness feature on, (that’s their name for Eco mode on this projector series) the lumens in bright mode drops to 1929, a 30% reduction from its high lumens output of 2752.
For the rest of the measurements with full lamp power, the IN2128HDx saw some steep drop offs in all modes save for blackboard. This is important because as we learned back in the color mode quality page, bright mode, while brightest, suffers greatly in the color department. So that said, in presentation mode, the projector’s brightness dropped to 751 lumens, a 73% brightness reduction from the peak measurement of 2752 lumens!
Typically, I expect presentation to be brighter, but it looks like InFocus attempted to get cinema mode quality color in presentation mode and brought it down to a similar brightness. You can adjust the brightness while in presentation mode if you want to tinker a bit for your own purposes. If you want to save any color settings however on a preset, you’ll have to utilize user mode, as adjusting the other color modes does not save such settings when you move off that mode at all. On a relative note, User mode starts out on a level fairly close to presentation mode, putting out 726 lumens.
Back to the rest of the modes, cinema mode actually came in higher than presentation, at 802 lumens. You could see some cinema modes have such a stark 70% reduction from bright to cinema as is the case here, but I still would have liked to have seen a bit higher lumens output for cinema and presentation modes.
Lastly, there is a whiteboard mode, a blackboard mode, and even a beige wall mode, though I skipped the beige as we really don’t see a need for that much these days. Whiteboard came in measured at 576 lumens, while blackboard was able to put out 2304 lumens.
The InFocus IN2128HDx lays claim to a 15,000:1 contrast ratio. While that may seem like a solid claim, everyone these days has a fairly high contrast ratio claim but performance varies from projector to projector. More or less here we are judging with our eyes. On the IN2128, I was able to view some scenes that looked great, with pretty good black levels that I wasn’t expecting. Nothing home theater quality, but OK. Definitely better than the IN116xa I reviewed recently.
All in all, you’re not going to be using this projector as a home theater projector, as I claimed you might be able to do with the similarly priced Epson PowerLite 990U. Unfortunately, this InFocus 2128HDx just does not seem to have that ability. But, if you need a better sized portable with sharp picture, acceptable black levels, and full HD native resolution, the IN2128HDx can check off your boxes succesfully.
InFocus has 34 db listed in Normal mode and 32 db in Eco mode. When the projector starts up, it’s pretty loud, but after it settles in about 15 seconds in, the noise level reduces to a very acceptable level. The drop off from Normal mode to Eco mode was slight, but you could hear the difference so it was significant enough. If Normal mode is too loud for you, feel comfortable moving into Eco mode (Low Lamp Power mode on this device) without sacrificing too much brightness (30%).
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