InFocus ScreenPlay 5700: welcome to the Crave Cinema

The Crave Cinema is now officially open for business thanks to the Infocus ScreenPlay 5700 projector. At £2,000 it's not bargain basement, but this particular model demands a second look. It feels like a small price to pay for a cinema in your own home. It really is good fun to play usher for your friends and recreate that cinema vibe in your pad -- and this is a cinema where you can smoke Turkish tobacco, drink fine wine, and enjoy your feature presentation in private.

The ScreenPlay 5700 is a very impressive projector, producing really detailed pictures from DVD movies, but it's also genuinely portable, which makes it easy to relocate your cinema to a friend's house (as many of the Crave team have discovered).

It's also easy to set up. Just sit the projector down on a desk or coffee table, hook it up to your DVD player, and you're in business. In a small space it will work only a metre and a half away from the screen. Even projecting onto a white wall in a non-darkened room gives a great picture. In fact, it gives our office a cool, European art-student feel -- we'd have old film noir on a constant loop just to show off our sophisticated bohemian style, if we didn't have to look after the lamp. It's rated at a healthy 3,000 hours, but they don't, alas, last for ever.

Still, the Crave Cinema needs more work before we can attract the real movie going public -- we're planning on creating a more authentic atmosphere with industrial quantities of stale overpriced popcorn, a gaggle of chattering teens at the back, sticky carpets and disgusting gummed up seats. -GC