The BenQ TH585P home entertainment projector is a refresh of the older BenQ TH585, which is still available. Both have the same $599 list price and nearly identical specs, the only difference being the lack of VGA connectors on the newer version. Either one also delivers low input lag for gaming, and more-than-acceptable image quality for watching movies or video. However, our tests turned up enough differences in performance for the TH585P to merit a separate review.

A Bright Image, an Easy Setup Process

As with the TH585, the TH585P is built around a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel DLP chip, but it lights up a maximum of only 1,920 by 1,080 pixels at a time, to give it a 1080p native resolution. The extra pixels let you digitally shift the picture by a little more than 5% up or down from its vertically centered position. This saves you from needing to tilt the projector and then use the vertical keystone adjustment, which can add artifacts to the image.

To help boost brightness and improve color accuracy, the TH585P also offers a six-segment, RGBWYC (red-green-blue-white-yellow-cyan) color wheel. The white panel is a common choice for DLP projectors meant for use in ambient light, because it lets the projector deliver a brighter image from the same light source (which is a lamp in this case) than an otherwise-identical projector without a white panel would offer. However, adding it can also hurt color accuracy, which the yellow and cyan panels help compensate for.

At just 6.2 pounds and 4.3 by 12.3 by 8.9 inches (HWD), the TH585P is small enough to carry easily from room to room, to the backyard for a movie night, or even to a friend's house for gaming. It doesn't come with a carrying case, though. If you want one, you'll have to buy it separately. The light weight also helps makes it easy to handle for permanent installation in a mount. Whether you set it up permanently or as needed, the 1.1x zoom allows some flexibility in placement, while the two HDMI ports let you connect to most video sources, game consoles, PCs, and mobile devices.

Somewhat surprisingly for a gaming projector, the TH585P delivers underwhelmingly low volume, both in absolute terms and for its 10-watt speaker. The audio system is suitable for a small room, but for larger rooms, or even in a small room if you want an immersive audio experience, you'll need to connect an external sound system to the audio-out port.

Solid Color Accuracy, But Some Lost Shadow Detail

The menus offer five predefined picture modes and two user modes. All allow customization, and all offer settings options that even include a color management system for adjusting hue, saturation, and gain separately for each primary and secondary color. However, overall image quality in our tests using default settings was excellent for the price, so there's little need to adjust anything beyond picking the picture mode you prefer.

The brightest mode, Bright, was slightly green-shifted in our tests, but far less so than many projectors' brightest modes, putting its color accuracy in the range of tolerable or better by most people's standards, at least on an occasional basis on a bright day or in a particularly bright room for ad hoc setup. All of the other modes delivered good-enough color accuracy that I didn't see any color errors I would have noticed if I weren't so familiar with our test suite.

Cinema mode delivered the most accurate color. After some preliminary testing, however, I picked Game mode as my preferred choice, even for watching movies and video, because it offered close to the same level of color accuracy as Cinema but did a better job handling dark scenes. That's important for games, as well as for movies and video.

In my tests, Game mode delivered good color accuracy by most standards and good contrast in bright scenes. It lost some shadow detail in dark scenes, but showed enough even with the most challenging scenes in our test suite that I could see what was happening. Game mode also delivered a measured input lag of 16.4 milliseconds (ms) for 1080p/60Hz input, using a Bodnar meter, which is a short enough lag for all but the most serious gamers.

For full HD 3D, the TH585P offers a single 3D picture mode and supports DLP-Link glasses. I saw no crosstalk in my tests and only a moderate level of 3D-related motion artifacts by current standards.

One potential issue for those who see rainbow artifacts (the red, green, blue flashes that single-chip projectors can show) and find them distracting, is that I saw them far more often with the TH585P than with most current DLP models, and they were far more obvious than usual, too. As always, if you are concerned about this issue, be sure to buy from a dealer who allows easy returns and doesn't add a restocking fee.

Based on the Society for Movie and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, the TH585P's 3,500-lumen rating should be enough to light up a 270-inch, 1.0-gain, 16:9 screen in a dark room, or a 150-inch screen in moderate ambient light. In my tests, even the lower-brightness Game mode delivered a suitably bright image to light up a 90-inch screen in a family room at night with lights on, and remain watchable—though a little washed out—using an 80-inch screen on a sunny afternoon in a room with lots of windows.

Verdict: Decent for Entry-Level Gaming and Home Entertainment

Whether your focus is on gaming, watching movies and video in a room with ambient light, or equally on both, the TH585P is worth a look. But be sure to consider whether your budget can stretch a bit to consider other options. The BenQ TH685P, for example, can accept 4K HDR input, takes good advantage of HDR, and shows fewer rainbow artifacts for only a little higher price. The Xgimi Horizon offers far more robust audio at the cost of an only slightly longer input lag. And if you consider rainbow artifacts unacceptably irksome, the Epson Home Cinema 2250 is guaranteed to not show any, though its input lag is more appropriate for casual—rather than serious—gaming.

For a tight budget, however, the TH585P, like the TH585 that came before, is a good entry-level choice and a solid value.