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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.
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 input lag (the time it takes to render received image data) in its Game mode is just 16ms with 60Hz games and 8.3ms with 120Hz games. Not surprisingly with lag this low, gaming feels as immediate and responsive on the TH685 as it does on even the best high-end TV. The TH685’s connections. 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. 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. 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. And yet while it certainly works as advertised in the responsiveness department, it’s not the all around champion in other important metrics like contrast ratio (10,000:1) or, most notably, resolution (1080p). Shows and movies watched on the projector mostly looked desaturated in a room with any bit of ambient light and while the lower resolution worked for some content, the extra pixels would’ve made everything much, much sharper.
The TH685's optics consist of a single-chip DLP system illuminated by a standard UHP lamp. The claimed peak brightness of 3,500 Lumens, though, is anything but standard, and should be enough to deliver either explosively potent images in a dark room, or still enjoyable images in a fairly bright room. Both handy options fora gaming-oriented projector. Connections, finally, include two HDMI ports, a powered USB, 3.5mm audio input and outputs, a D-Sub PC input, a monitor output, and an RS-232 control port.Also impressive is how well the TH685 holds on to its colours when playing HDR content. 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 fact, with so much brightness feeding into them, its colours actually look engagingly vibrant and rich. Especially, again, with gaming sources. The BenQ TH685
For a small and relatively inexpensive 1080p projector, the TH685 produces impressive color accuracy. 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. The TH685 copies the increasingly formulaic look of affordable ‘coffee table’ projectors with its small rectangular footprint, glossy white finish, large grilled side section for venting heat from its lamp, offset lens, and window cut into the top for accessing the lens’s zoom and focus rings. Projectors typically struggle with HDR (a technology designed with TVs in mind), but the TH685’s high brightness and claimed coverage of 95% of the Rec 709 colour palette give it a chance of getting some value from HDR’s expanded light range. The BenQ TH685’s control buttons 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.For the most accurate picture, I used the Cinema mode, along with the Normal color temperature mode. This resulted in a fairly consistent and fairly accurate color temperature across the brightness range, though it was a bit warmer than D65 with an excess of red. With these settings, the TH685 was capable of 182 nits on a 102-inch, 1.0-gain screen, which calculates out to around 1,641 lumens. Setup is fairly simple, too: to help position the picture you'll use a bottom foot that’s used to adjust projection height and the manual zoom / focus dials along the top. 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. If you can find a way to get absolute darkness, say, by taking the projector outside for a movie night or squirreling it away in a basement, you’ll regain some of the contrast and color levels, but don’t go in expecting the same saturation or contrast of a comparable LED-LCD TV. That last bit may not matter as much to you if overall image size is your biggest concern, but it’s worth pointing out all the same. The TH685 is clearly positioned by BenQ as a gaming projector, so let’s first explore its console and PC credentials.
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