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It's also pleasingly easy to set up. There are simple drop-down legs to adjust the angle of projection; effective zoom and focus rings accessible through a panel cut out of the chassis's top edge; and the amount of zoom available is a very respectable (for this money) 1.3x.
Contrast ratio, as has been the case with all the projectors I reviewed this year, ended up being a no-contest win for the HT2050A. It's just noticeably better in this incredibly important test. The TH658 and 28HDR are basically tied, in terms of contrast. Their slight differences aren't visible side by side. The HT2050A has nearly 3x the contrast ratio, and it's obvious. Shadows are darker, the image has more apparent depth, it just has more punch. The other two look flat in comparison. I wouldn't call them "washed out" like early LCD The BenQ TH685 is best classified as a mid-size long-throw DLP projector – you’ll need to put a bit of space between it and the wall but it can fill a potential screen size of up to 100 inches from 2.5 meters away. So why the focus on input lag? Traditionally that’s been a real weak spot for projectors and most still routinely have over 30ms of input lag – i.e. the time it takes from the picture to be sent to the projector to when it’s displayed on the screen. For gamers, that number has always been way too high and made playing twitch-based first-person shooters a nightmare. I set up the projector for a 90-inch image at 7 feet, 3 inches from the screen. One small annoyance is that it's harder than it should be to get the image well focused. Moving the focus ring just a little changes the focus a lot, making it hard to adjust without overshooting the right setting.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. 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. Its biggest strength without question is its brightness. Few if any of those 3,500 claimed nits of brightness seems to go AWOL en-route to the screen, resulting in pictures that erupt off even a neutral projector screen with far more punch than the vast majority of projectors can manage – including many models costing way more than the TH685 does. For a small and relatively inexpensive 1080p projector, the TH685 produces impressive color accuracy.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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. While it might not be particularly original, though, the TH685 is not unattractive. And it certainly doesn’t dominate your décor. More bass and volume would have been great and most gamers will surely prefer a good set of headphones, while most movie fans will surely prefer a decent soundbar. As integrated, convenient projector sound systems go, though, it's really not bad. 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. 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
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. Detail view of the TH685. 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 1.0-gain, 16:9 white screen. As with most projectors, however, the modes you're most likely to use don't project at full brightness. For my formal tests in a dark room, Cinema mode was bright enough to fill a 90-inch-diagonal white screen. In informal tests in a family room with lots of windows, it was still bright enough to light up an 80-inch 1.0-gain white screen for nighttime viewing with lights on or for daytime viewing on a rainy day. 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. 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.
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