John Archer has written about, and been immersed in the world of, home entertainment technology for over 20 years. As with most projectors, Bright mode sacrifices color accuracy for visibility in a setting with lots of ambient light, such as in a family room with lots of sunny windows. But for a gaming projector that can serve well for movie nights and holds up to ambient light during the day, the BenQ TH685i is solid. Team up with TH685 and your favorite video game console to lead your team to victory on the battlefield and the game courts. From videos I've seen on YouTube the TH685 looks CONSIDERABLY better in this respect, but I appreciate I'm watching a video recorded on a camera, rendered by an editing suite and compressed by YouTube.

They differ only in the absence of two VGA ports—for a PC input and a passthrough monitor out—which are all but obsolete today. That mode also exhibits the green tint we've come to expect from most projector's brightest picture mode. This sense of sharpness holds up well no matter how quickly you hurtle through a gaming world, thanks to the PJ's excellently executed support for 120Hz refresh rates (with games that support it).Kicking off with the upsides, the 3,500 Lumens of claimed brightness doesn't feel exaggerated in the slightest. In particular, it boost sharpness and shadow detail in dark areas, so that you can spot lurking enemies or hidden secrets more easily. Once plugged in, the dongle lays flat against the back of the projector and can be protected and hidden by the plastic cover. The PJ's HDR Brightness option can improve black levels a little, but only at the cost of even more shadow detail. 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.

Disappointingly, the BenQ TH685 is a ‘dumb’ projector – and it doesn’t have any included smart features to speak of.The TH685P offers five predefined, but customizable, picture modes—Bright, Living Room, Cinema, Sports, and Game—plus two User modes. Very much on the plus side, the TH685P's chamber speaker delivers far more robust audio than you would expect from its 5 watts. One of the biggest gaming hurdles projectors still deal with is input lag—the amount of time it takes a button press on a controller to cause a reaction on screen. There's been a big to-do over the past few months about the release of new consoles from Microsoft and Sony—the Xbox Series X/S and PS5, respectively—and next generation gaming at 4K with 120Hz refresh rate. As with most projectors, however, the modes you're most likely to use don't project at full brightness.

It's dressed in a crisp and glossy white finish, features calming rounded corners, and doesn't take up much space at all, being only 31cm wide and 22cm deep. It measured 2,705 ANSI lumens on our sample, which is just over 77% of the published spec of 3,500 ANSI lumens. I didn't see any crosstalk in my tests, and saw only the moderate level of 3D-related motion artifacts that is typical for 3D projectors.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. 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.