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Except for a few stragglers, 1080p really is dead now for mainstream gamers, projectors just don't seem to be keeping up with TVs in this regard. The four modes with better color accuracy were all closely matched on contrast, black levels, and sense of three-dimensionality in dark scenes. The extra pixels let you shift the picture up or down from the center position by 5 percent of the image height, as a convenient way to position the image for your screen. Extreme brightness can cause colours to wash out on displays that don’t support a wide enough colour range, but there’s nothing bleached about the TH685’s palette. In my tests, even the lower-brightness Cinema mode delivered a bright, 90-inch image with nicely saturated color in a dark 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. The BenQ TH685i is a solid gaming projector that, thanks to the included BenQ QS01 streaming stick, works well as a living room display for TV and movies, too.Its shortcomings might also be easy to ignore if you're looking for a dedicated gaming projector to run alongside a home theatre model, perhaps only brought out as and when required. For SDR content, Cinema mode has the best color accuracy and is the one I chose for most of my testing. Please note that in respect of replacement lamps for Epson projectors, the Original Inside lamp consists of a bulb made by Philips and a generic housing. There's a five-position HDR Brightness slider (ranging from -2 to 2) that adjusts overall highlights. 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.
Finally, as we've seen numerous times before with very bright single-chip DLP projectors, the TH685 is more prone than I'd like to DLP's rainbow effect, where stripes of colour flit over stand-out bright edges and objects.If that's something you want to avoid, you'll probably prefer a projector with fewer or no flashes even at the cost of other strengths. It has a native resolution of 1080p (1920x1080), although it accepts 4K (3840x2160) and downconverts the signal. I found a good compromise to be a setting of around 6, which improved colors to my eye and decreased brightness by about 25% (still enough for my room). The game picture mode on the BenQ TH685i turns on the projector's Fast Mode, which disables image correction and enhancements like keystone correction and shortens the time it takes to display the image by using an algorithm, therefore leading to a lower input lag. The only cosmetic difference between the TH685 and TH685i is the collection and orientation of inputs on the back of the projector.
Bright HDR games, such as Forza Horizon 4, benefit from a punchy, saturated colour presentation, with little evidence of the pallid tones you can experience with projectors that deliver more brightness than their colour systems can keep up with.There are some beautiful and colorful nebulas in the background of space that pop out, especially when a sun shines from the center of them.
The light output of the TH685i was more than enough, even with a little bit of ambient daylight—although too much ambient light caused shadow detail to be lost as the scene continued through the evening suburbs. It's also worth adding that the TH685 runs decently quietly for such a small, bright projector, useful since you might end up sitting quite close to it. Video gaming is currently enjoying the sort of explosion in popularity that home cinema did in the 1980s. The TH685P offers five predefined, but customizable, picture modes—Bright, Living Room, Cinema, Sports, and Game—plus two User modes.BenQ exclusive projector-optimized HDR with HDR10 and HLG support offers greater brightness, contrast range, and image optimization, downscaling 4K HDR Blu-rays and streaming content for brilliant cinema enjoyment in bright settings. This can steal visual impact from dark scenes in movies, but can help gamers spot what's happening in dark areas more quickly. 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. It isn't as egregious as others I've seen and would be acceptable to many viewers for non-critical viewing in ambient light.
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