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InFocus Work Big IN42+ review

Dave Mitchell Read more October 7, 2009

£1298

Price when reviewed

The latest Work Big projector from InFocus certainly lives up to its name, as the IN42+ can throw an image up to 12.7m across the diagonal, making it a prime candidate for conference or lecture hall duties. The price may look a bit steep but remember you’re getting a remarkable 4,000 lumens to play with. This means you can position the projector up to 19m away from the screen.

The IN42+ is a mighty slab of plastic that’s well built and easy to adjust. For testing, we decided our boardroom wasn’t big enough and so we set up the projector in our 40-seat seminar room instead, which allowed us to position it 7m from our viewing screen.

Basic setup is easy enough, thanks to the drop-down legs and ratchets on each front corner for vertical positioning. Underneath the pop-up panel you’ll find dials that move the lens housing, enabling you to fine-tune both the vertical and horizontal positioning. At this price we’d have expected an autofocus feature, but this is a manual affair where you use the adjuster ring around the lens. Zoom is also controlled here, and we were pleased to see the projector keeping focus when this was adjusted.

You get a pile of inputs to play with and the IN42+ will scan through these, locate the active one and set it up automatically. For such a high-output projector noise levels were extremely low, although the much larger chassis does allow for more internal air movement. Selecting the low power mode drops output to 3,200 lumens and the fan noise decreased to near-silent. We liked the fact that the heat exhaust points to the front, so we didn’t get roasted while making our presentation.

We were impressed, too, with InFocus’ big picture, as even at mere 7m distance we were able to fill the opposite wall with an image of more than 5.5m across the diagonal. Brightness was superb with images, charts and text clearly visible with the blinds pulled open and the lights left on, although we did find photographs lost a great deal of detail. Colour accuracy was reasonably good, with the red, green and blue colour ramps in our technical tests reproduced without any banding, which equated to brighter photos. However, the image quality lacked the vibrancy of the very best projectors. The control menu also offers a sharpness setting, and we found text and charts could be improved marginally by playing with the five available settings. We also preferred the Sharper to the Standard setting, as it improved the level of detail visible in our test pictures.

The onscreen menu makes light work of image manipulation and offers presets for presentations, photos, film and video, plus three user presets for storing custom contrast and brightness settings. An unusual feature is the embedded web server, allowing the projector to be controlled remotely from a browser that provides access to most of the same settings as the main control panel.

LCD projectors command a premium, but street prices for the IN42+ put it at the lower end of this scale, making it look good in terms of overall value. For an LCD projector image quality is average, but InFocus is offering a lot of features, a wide selection of inputs and a choice of optional short-throw and long-throw lenses.