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InFocus IN1144

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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InFocus IN1144 - InFocus IN1144
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

The InFocus IN1144 is superficially similar to several other 500-lumen, WXGA (1,280-by-800) projectors, but stands out for how well it avoids showing rainbow artifacts.

Pros & Cons

    • Small and light.
    • HDMI port.
    • Reads files from an SD card or USB memory key.
    • LED light source with a 30,000-hour lifetime.
    • Shows scaling artifacts (unwanted patterns added to some screens) at its claimed native resolution.

InFocus IN1144 Specs

Engine Type DLP
Inputs and Interfaces Analog VGA
Inputs and Interfaces HDMI
Native Resolution 1280 x 800
Rated Brightness 500
Warranty 36
Weight 1.8
All Specs

The InFocus IN1144 ($600 street) is one more entry in a growing category of projectors that includes the Acer K330 , the NEC NP-L50W , and the Editors' Choice 3M Mobile Projector MP410 . What defines the category is a sub-three pound weight, a DLP chip with WXGA (1280 by 800) resolution, and an LED light source with either a 300 or 500-lumen rating. The IN1144 falls in the 500-lumen group, along with the Acer and NEC models, and it's one of the best in the group.

Aside from the brightness ratings, the biggest differences between the 300-lumen models and 500-lumen models in this category are their sizes and weights. The 300-lumen models generally weigh less than a pound by themselves and less than two pounds with their power blocks, while the 500-lumen models typically don't need power blocks but weigh between 2 pounds 8 ounces and just under 3 pounds. The IN1144 is a little unusual on this score. It weighs only 1 pound 13 ounces, but needs a power block. Even including the power block, however, the total weight is 2 pounds 10 ounces.

Basics

The IN1144 comes with a soft case large enough to hold the 1.7 by 6.7 by 5.4 inch (HWD) projector plus the power block, cables, credit-card size remote, and the optional Wi-Fi dongle ($29 direct). InFocus says you can download both Windows and Mac apps, but no mobile apps,  from its website so you can show images over the wireless connection. For maximum portability, you can also use the projector with just an SD card or USB memory key. The IN1144 can read an assortment of file types directly, including most common image, video, and audio formats as well as PDF and Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

Setup is standard. In addition to an SD card slot and USB A port for a USB key, the back of the projector offers HDMI and VGA ports plus two mini plugs for A/V in and audio out. The A/V in port can accept both audio and composite video, but InFocus doesn't provide an appropriate adaptor for video. Also worth mention is a Kensington Lock slot on one side, so you can leave the projector sitting on a conference room table without worrying about someone walking away with it.

As with all the projectors in this category, the IN1144's LED light source is meant to last the life of the projector, which helps keep the total cost of ownership down. InFocus rates the LEDs at 30,000 hours.

Brightness and Data Image Quality

The 500-lumen rating is obviously far below the 2,500 or 3,000 lumens that's typical for today's lamp-based portable projectors. However, perception of brightness is logarithmic, which means you'll perceive 500 lumens as being much more than one fifth as bright as 2,500 lumens.

I found the projector bright enough to let me run my tests using the 78-inch wide (92-inch diagonal) image size I normally use with standard projectors. However, even with theater dark lighting, the image wasn't bright enough at that size for extended viewing. If you want to watch, say, a full-length movie, a 55-inch wide (65-inch diagonal) size would be a better choice. With ambient light, you'll want to drop to an even smaller size.

Data image quality is reasonably good, but well short of excellent. On our standard suite of DisplayMate tests, colors were fully saturated in most modes, with yellow a true yellow, rather than a mustard color, but red and blue a little dark in terms of a hue-saturation-brightness color model. Color balance was excellent in most modes, with neutral grays over the full range from white to black.

One potentially annoying issue is that I couldn't get the entire screen in crisp focus all at the same time. I settled on focusing a broad diagonal swath from the upper left corner to the lower right, leaving two corners with slightly soft focus.

The IN1144 also shares one shortcoming with all of the other projectors in this category, with scaling artifacts (in the form of unwanted patterns in fills) at the claimed native resolution. As I discussed in detail my review of the Optoma ML500 , this simply shouldn't happen. However, the artifacts won't be an issue for most people, since they show up only in patterned fills with closely spaced lines or dots. More important, the scaling doesn't affect text readability very much, as it does with some projectors in this category. Text was easily readable at sizes as small as 6.8 points.

Video and Other Issues

Video quality for the IN1144 is best described as watchable. I saw a slight loss of shadow detail (detail based on shading in dark areas) and a tendency for skin tones to be slightly greenish in some scenes, but the quality overall was better than many data projectors can manage.

It also helps that the IN1144 doesn't show rainbow artifacts easily, which is always a potential problem for single-chip DLP projectors, with bright areas breaking up into red-green-blue rainbows. As is typical, the rainbows show up more frequently with video than with data images, but I didn't see any with data, and saw far fewer with video than I've seen with most DLP projectors.

One other plus for the IN1144 is its surprisingly good audio quality. I was able to hear every word of some quietly spoken dialog that's impossible to decipher with most projectors. Unfortunately the two-watt speaker doesn't offer a lot of volume, so you may not hear much from more than three or four feet away.

Despite some minor issues that keep it from being Editors' Choice, most notably the lack of even focus across the entire screen, the InFocus IN1144 stands out from the pack of 300 and 500-lumen projectors. Its balance of brightness, data image quality, video quality, and features—including the ability to read an assortment of file formats from USB keys and SD cards—makes it at least a match for most of its competition, while its near lack of rainbow artifacts makes it far more watchable for anyone who's sensitive to seeing those artifacts. If you want a projector that's both highly portable and eminently watchable, the InFocus IN1144 should be on your short list.

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Further Reading

Final Thoughts

InFocus IN1144 - InFocus IN1144

InFocus IN1144 Review

4.0 Excellent

The InFocus IN1144 is superficially similar to several other 500-lumen, WXGA (1,280-by-800) projectors, but stands out for how well it avoids showing rainbow artifacts.

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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