BenQ TH685 1080p Gaming Projector with HDR and HLG, 8.3ms 1080p@120Hz Low Input Lag for Gaming, 3500 Lumens High Brightness, Enhanced Game Mode

£374.5
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BenQ TH685 1080p Gaming Projector with HDR and HLG, 8.3ms 1080p@120Hz Low Input Lag for Gaming, 3500 Lumens High Brightness, Enhanced Game Mode

BenQ TH685 1080p Gaming Projector with HDR and HLG, 8.3ms 1080p@120Hz Low Input Lag for Gaming, 3500 Lumens High Brightness, Enhanced Game Mode

RRP: £749.00
Price: £374.5
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Description

Gamers will appreciate the TH685's fast lag time. With Fast mode on—the default setting for Game picture mode—my Bodnar meter measured the lag for 1080p, 60Hz input at 16.4 ms. BenQ doesn't include a carrying case, but the projector is still quite portable; gamers who need a projector they can easily carry from room to room or to a friend's house will appreciate the small size and light weight. The TH685 is small, light, and easy to carry. The TH685 is clearly positioned by BenQ as a gaming projector, so let’s first explore its console and PC credentials. At 6.2 pounds and 4 by 12 by 9 inches (HWD), the TH685 is easy to handle for setup. The digital image shift and 1.3x zoom lens also add flexibility for positioning. And if you need to tilt the projector up or down even after adjusting the shift, you can square off the image with the +/- 30 degree vertical keystone control. Switch to the Bright mode and things change quite a bit. Color temperature accuracy goes out the window, everything looks quite green, but there's a nearly 70% increase in light output, approximately 309 nits, or 2,782 lumens. In a dark room this is incredibly bright. So bright, I doubt most people would use it in this mode to watch a movie. Movie theaters, for comparison, are a faction of this. Its input lag (the time it takes to render received image data) in its Game mode is just 16ms with 60Hz games and 8.3ms with 120Hz games. Not surprisingly with lag this low, gaming feels as immediate and responsive on the TH685 as it does on even the best high-end TV. The TH685’s connections.

The brightness helps it claim coverage of up to 95 per cent of the REC.709 colour palette, and should provide a healthy foundation for the TH685's unexpected support for the HDR10 HDR format. Video gaming is currently enjoying the sort of explosion in popularity that home cinema did in the 1980s. Sales of the latest Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles are truly mind-boggling (despite ongoing supply issues). It's no surprise, then, to see makers of traditionally AV gear suddenly falling over themselves to cater for the gaming market. Projectors typically struggle with HDR (a technology designed with TVs in mind), but the TH685’s high brightness and claimed coverage of 95% of the Rec 709 colour palette give it a chance of getting some value from HDR’s expanded light range. The BenQ TH685’s control buttons

Conclusion: Game on

As is typical in this price range, the TH685 offers a single 3D picture mode and works with DLP-link glasses only. I saw no crosstalk or ghosting in my tests, and only minor 3D-related motion artifacts. The TH685 copies the increasingly formulaic look of affordable ‘coffee table’ projectors with its small rectangular footprint, glossy white finish, large grilled side section for venting heat from its lamp, offset lens, and window cut into the top for accessing the lens’s zoom and focus rings. Despite the projector’s evident gaming focus, though, the TH685 also typically delivers very credible, natural and consistent colours when watching HDR or SDR video from 4K/HD Blu-rays and streaming services. If you can find a way to get absolute darkness, say, by taking the projector outside for a movie night or squirreling it away in a basement, you’ll regain some of the contrast and color levels, but don’t go in expecting the same saturation or contrast of a comparable LED-LCD TV. That last bit may not matter as much to you if overall image size is your biggest concern, but it’s worth pointing out all the same.

There's also a Game sound preset that has been designed to give more emphasis to subtle details, making them clearer and spotlighting their location in the soundstage. Its potential is undoubtedly hamstrung a bit by the projector only carrying a mono 5W speaker system, but nonetheless this beamer actually sounds much better than expected, throwing its audio a good distance clear of its enclosure, keeping dialogue clear and convincing, and delivering on the promise of lots of subtle audio detailing. When it comes to other less game-specific features, the TH685 carries an auto vertical keystone adjustment for straightening the image’s edges, and a digital lens shift. Note, though, that these digital features are no replacement for physical, optical adjustments, since they essentially distort the picture away from the pixel for pixel accuracy you ideally want. The TH685 does what it sets out to do pretty well, serving up an enjoyable gaming performance that’s particularly at home in rooms with a little ambient light in them. The third big plus of the TH685’s brightness is that, as hoped, it means you can watch its pictures in rooms that still have a bit of light in them. Which is really handy given the relatively casual usage situations the TH685 is likely to find itself in. Some very bright parts of the picture with HDR sources, such as sunlight reflections on skin, can bleach to near-white more than they should. The projector’s high brightness also contributes to some fairly noticeable rainbow effect (stripes of pure colour that flit over stand-out bright objects) from the DLP optics.

BenQ TH685 Projector Specifications

BenQ's new projector treats gamers pretty well, but John Archer isn't convinced it's for movie lovers too The brightness also chimes nicely with the latest HDR gaming graphics. Games don’t typically have quite as much dynamic range or such ‘natural’ dark spaces as movies, either, meaning they’re less likely to fall prey to the dark scene problems I’ll be describing later. The TH685's optics consist of a single-chip DLP system illuminated by a standard UHP lamp. The claimed peak brightness of 3,500 Lumens, though, is anything but standard, and should be enough to deliver either explosively potent images in a dark room, or still enjoyable images in a fairly bright room. Both handy options fora gaming-oriented projector. On top of all its other strengths, the TH685 runs unexpectedly quietly. Even when watching HDR, with the lamp running at full tilt, fan noise is low enough and constant enough to be relatively easy to tune out. The BenQ TH685’s remote control

For HDR testing, I used 4K discs only, since HLG content is still more of a promise than a reality at this writing. But, according to BenQ, both modes work essentially the same way. In my tests, the TH685 switched to its single HDR10 mode and automatically downconverted the 4K image to the projector's native 1080p. As with most HDR projectors, the TH685 offers what's usually called an HDR brightness setting for manual adjustment. The best setting will vary with the ambient light level as well as from movie to movie.Connections, finally, include two HDMI ports, a powered USB, 3.5mm audio input and outputs, a D-Sub PC input, a monitor output, and an RS-232 control port. The zoom and focus adjustments are easy to access and reasonably responsive, and the 1.3x optical zoom is pretty expansive for such a cheap projector, making it easier to adapt it to different room sizes (which could be important if you want to take it around to friends’ houses for group game nights). As a pleasant surprise, it also delivers far more robust audio than you would expect from its onboard 5-watt mono speaker, thanks to the chamber design. Audio quality is good for such a small projector, and the volume is high enough to fill a large family room. For stereo or truly high quality, however, plan on using an external sound system. In my tests with 4K HDR movies, brightly lit scenes had nicely saturated color and good contrast. Dark scenes were similar enough to the SDR versions of the same movies that—with no way to do a side-by-side comparison—differences were hard to pinpoint. My impression is that they offered the same shadow detail as in SDR, but with darker gray levels to yield a more dramatic image and greater sense of dimensionality.



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