InFocus IN1188HD Ultra-portable LED Projector

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Initial thoughts on unboxing and set up!

3.0

The Infocus 1188HD is a nice little compact unit that comes with a lot of extras I never expected. Like a handy padded soft carry case and power supplies for every region of the world! No travel adaptor needed here. I was however a little surprised to see a DVD ROM disc user manual included in a 2019 model year unit. No printed material here other than the Warranty card, a multi lingual customer support booklet and a quick start guide which if you're even remotely comfortable with AV tech is pretty much wasted paper. The unit is well packed in the box and the packaging is minimal. Just enough here to ensure safe travel to you. As I had the unit shipped to Canada I can say that it arrived unscathed! Out of the box the 1188 HD is compact and relatively light.This unit is probably a full third smaller in every dimension than the Mitsubishi unit it replaced and equally a third lighter. Which is great if you're installing it with a ceiling mount. Which is exactly what I did. I have been a using a projector in my home theater now for over 10 years and this is the third unit to be installed using the very first universal mount I ever bought. So no worries about meshing this with your older mounting hardware. Once mounted I connected the power and the HDMI cable to my receiver and hit the power button and just like that...VOILA! The projector automatically detected that it was inverted and displayed the image in the correct orientation with absolutely ZERO input from me. Very nice feature! And that brings me to the most frustrating part of the set up. Having built the home theater room around my previous set up means that the holes cut in my suspension ceiling and the position of the projector mount were optimised for the previous unit. At 10 feet from my screen I was projecting a 90 inch diagonal image but could have easily increased that another 15 inches or so by adjusting the lens. And this is where the 1188HD gets a failing grade in my book. There is NO manual control over the lens whatsoever . To make matters worse the digital zoom controls limit you to 50%, 75%, 100%, 125% and 150% image size. I am exceptionally disappointed that the image size is not adjustable in 1% increments because now I have to decide if I want to display at 100% and move my entire set up closer to the screen or display at 75% and move it all back. Either way I have to re-sight the entire mount with the projector running if I want to fill the entire screen. which of course I do! Because this is a permanent set up it means significantly more work than I was anticipating. You absolutely need to take this into consideration if you plan on using this unit in a dedicated home theater set up! Once I have things ripped apart and put back together I'll be back with a follow up review on my impressions of the units performance.

Wes A. on May 05, 2020 I found this helpful (3)