LG CineBeam PF610P: Image Quality

LG has long been a prominent player in the projector business, owing to the company's solutions and devices' ability to cover a very wide spectrum of prospective consumers; the company's portfolio comprises all types of projectors, from ultra-high-performance models to smaller, compact, easy-to-carry devices.

Its appearance is unremarkable, although this is not unusual in this product range. It is 22.5 centimeters wide, 19.2 centimeters deep, and 6.9 centimeters high, and weighs slightly over one and a half kilograms (1.65 kg); because of this, it fits rather comfortably even in a backpack, making it easy to transport.

The lens is located on the front of the projector, as is customary. A focusing dial and a small joystick that also works as a button are located at the top and can be useful if you have difficulty with the remote control.

The I / O and two HDMI 1.4, two USB 2.0, one Ethernet, one 3.5mm analog audio, and one optical digital audio connector are located on the device's back. The maximum noise level, according to the manufacturer, is 29 dB, and we measured 30 dB with our own device, which is quite acceptable and indicates hardly detectable hum in full silence.

Designers are frequently compelled to make significant trade-offs in resolution and brightness when working with such a small mobile projector, but the LG CineBeam PF610P has made a concerted effort to limit this to a minimum.

Based on the DLP imaging technique, the model features a native resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, allowing it to reproduce Full HD material. It would have been preferable to have it outfitted with some form of pixel shift technology to generate a resolution that appears to be 4K, but this would have greatly increased its size and price.

LG is increasingly pursuing laser light sources for its projectors, but in this case, they have opted for more traditional LEDs with a lifespan of up to 30,000 hours. The maximal luminous flux of 1000 ANSI lumens greatly exceeds that of cordless mobile projectors but falls short of standard home devices in this regard.

This brightness is sufficient to generate a great picture in the evening, with the lights turned off, or in a nearly darkened room, but during the day, in a room where the curtains are not closed or the lights are turned on, the picture is nearly unwatchable, with almost faint outlines.

Under typical conditions, the tones are lovely, lifelike, and function well even with historically troublesome content such as a dark, windy landscape, artificially rippling water, or human facial skin.

There is no evidence of the unpleasant veil that may still be seen in many projectors today. Only very, very dark gray appears, thus perfect, faultless black should be abandoned. The contrast is decent, but it is not startlingly good.

Today, more and more projectors enable the handling of high dynamic range materials; this device is one of them, however, the HDR impact is not very impressive due to the relatively low maximum brightness.

DLP-based products still have a reasonably typical rainbow effect, which means that all three primary colors appear in the image for a brief duration, and sadly, you can see it here as well.

The so-called mosquito net phenomenon occurs when the grid delimiting the pixels is not visible at all in regular use, and these distracting lines become evident only when one gets very close to the canvas.

The LG CineBeam PF610P expands the mid-range model lineup. It can project a 20-inch image from a distance of 53 inches, a 60-inch image from a distance of 60 inches, and a 100-inch diagonal from a distance of 265 cm.

It lacks autofocus, thus the focus must be set manually using the little dial on the top. There is also no four-sided keystone adjustment, which would be extremely useful if the projected image was not a completely regular rectangle.

The projector has been subjected to the company's so-called upscaling procedure, known as Spoken Super Resolution. Although this is technically capable of mending lower resolution materials, we did not notice any difference in the visual world after activating it, even when we supplied it with some disastrous SD material that could have been dramatically enhanced.

And there is slight noise in low-resolution, low-bit rate videos, which can be greatly addressed by turning on the Noise Reduction function.