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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. The TH685’s intriguing audio system also offers Cinema, Sports and Music modes, all bolstered by CinemaMaster Audio+2 technology that BenQ claims combines an aluminium driver with a resonance chamber and heat-resistant neodymium magnets to boost vocal clarity, detail reproduction and bass while reducing distortions.
Like most of its direct competitors, the TH685 has several settings for fine-tuning the image range: general brightness, contrast, and gamma adjustments, plus a color management system for adjusting hue, saturation, and gain separately for each primary and secondary color. It isn't as egregious as others I've seen and would be acceptable to many viewers for non-critical viewing in ambient light. In informal tests in a family room with lots of windows, it was still bright enough to light up an 80-inch 1. Using Calman calibration software from Portrait Displays, an X-rite i1 Pro 3 spectrophotometer, and a Murideo Six-G pattern generator, Cinema mode out-of-the-box measured the best color temperature (Normal) just above the 6500K target, at 6697K.
Horizontal lens shift allows you to correct this distortion so that you can place the projector to the left or right of the projected image. For SDR content, Cinema mode has the best color accuracy and is the one I chose for most of my testing. All these modes did a good job of showing the subtle gradations that make close-ups of rounded objects, such as faces, look three-dimensional. The extreme brightness can also sometimes cause subtle detailing to be clipped out of the very brightest highlights of pictures. In particular, it boost sharpness and shadow detail in dark areas, so that you can spot lurking enemies or hidden secrets more easily.
It measured 2,705 ANSI lumens on our sample, which is just over 77% of the published spec of 3,500 ANSI lumens.With low input lag and a massive, bright image, this is the kind of display gamers can use to effectively pwn the noobs, on a 100-plus-inch screen, while even leaving some lights on. If you plan on ceiling mounting the projector just be warned that the included power cable is a bit on the shorter side, but it should be enough to reach an outlet if you put it on a table. It gave some nice pop to the outdoors and the rocky walls in the depths of Moria kept their texture. And while that is all very exciting (if you're into it), the reality is many gamers are perfectly content to continue at 1080p on those consoles, or with their Xbox Ones and PS4s considering how difficult it is to snag one of the new ones. The rated 3,500 lumens is bright enough, according to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, to light up a 270-inch diagonal screen in a dark room or a 150-inch screen in moderate ambient light, assuming a 1.
Replacing a bare bulb in the original projector lamp housing is more challenging than replacing the entire lamp housing. That doesn’t make what’s on offer here awful by any means, but there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement, too. 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. And the addition of the Android TV interface instead of something like Aptoide makes it a viable option for TV and movies—even if it's currently missing direct support for Netflix. Which is really handy given the relatively casual usage situations the TH685 is likely to find itself in.An updated version of the BenQ TH685, which it replaces in BenQ's line, it has almost identical specs to those of its predecessor. There are movie and TV-related picture presets, too, making the point that on paper, at least, the TH685 is not JUST a gaming projector.
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