1080p Movie Projector

10Nov

1080p Movie Projector

Optoma HD20 1080p Home Projector For The Budget Minded!

I wrote this review over half a year ago on Amazon, but for some reason it looks like they must have taken the product off their page for a while or something. I searched for this Optoma HD20 today to see if the price has changed and it had zero reviews. I am reposting this review because it looked like the one I had written had gotten a 100% positive helpful feedback rating, and so I know it must have been helpful to all that read it. Hopefully this review helps those of you who are on the edge about purchasing this projector.

Pros: Good looking, gloss-white finish. Low-noise fan on normal-bulb mode. 4000 hours lamp life on econo is greater then most projectors! Good enough to use in bright mode to use with lights turned on in the room. In the dark, it looks simply amazing!

1080p content looks very good. Blu-rays played from a PS3 (or other blu-ray player) look awesome. I watched Kung-Fu Panda and was “wowed” by what you can notice on a much larger screen. I just watched Transformers : Revenge of the Fallen on it last night and I was amazed at the details and I noticed things I didn’t even notice when I saw it in IMAX. This might have been because in IMAX you have such an insanely huge screen that you miss some things you might not have noticed before since you have to actually turn your head to look at the entire screen. Still, blu-ray content is amazing to see with this projector. I find it very hard to believe you can buy this for under $1000.

Video games look awesome. It works well with PS3 and 360 consoles. You get a huge advantage over other players when you can see them off in the distance before they could actually see you on a normal HDTV. This of course all depends on the size of the screen you use. I’m using a 92″ diagonal white screen by EliteScreens. Not the greatest of screens but will get me by for a year or two until I get the funds for a good, fixed screen.

When using my PS3 with my tv I set the RGB color-spectrum to limited range in the display options on the PS3. On the tv, with the setting on full it would be far too dark and black out way too much shadow detail. On this projector you can turn on full-range and make use of the entire spectrum and it will give you better blacks and whites this way. If you put this projector on the bright pre-set setting (not high lamp mode) then you can blind yourself by the whites this thing is capable of in the dark. Bright setting should really only be used when you have a lot of ambient light to fight with. Otherwise the Cinema, Reference, or your own custom settings with the help of a calibration disc is probably best.

Optoma HD20 Home Projector

There are lot’s of options for adjusting brightness, contrast, sharpness, etc. Everything you find on current HDTV’s seems to be a setting you can change here. I personally find cinema mode is about perfect for use in dark environments where you can shut off all the light and enjoy a movie. Sharpness is used differently on this projector then it is on many HDTV’s. With my tv I took the sharpness down to zero, because all it was doing was adding pixels to make the picture appear sharper and it would actually take away from the realism of the picture. On this projector the default value is 7 and if you lower it you are actually softening the picture and going negative with the sharpness effect. I found the sweet spot to be 10. At the value of 10 I get extremely sharp, crisp looking text in all my games and the picture looks better at that setting then at the default of 7. Anything below 7 would turn too soft and look blurred… like looking through a water covered windshield.

The Optoma features automatic shut-off which you can adjust. By default I believe it is turned off. I set mine for 15 minutes. This feature will automatically turn off the projector after no signal is detected for “xx” amount of minutes. Very useful if you are not the only one using the projector and have fears of friends/family leaving it turned on.

Cons: I have been used to using a Samsung 46″ LN46A650 model tv, and then going to this, there is a very noticeable difference in black level. You will not get the deep blacks with this projector that you can on a good HDTV, but thankfully it doesn’t ruin the experience. Black level detail is there, which is good, it just does not produce an inky-black. It’s more of a very dark shade of gray. I messed around with the Digital Video Essentials blu-ray for the contrast/brightness adjustments for a while. I was not able to get the entire line-chart to display. Either the whites would get too washed out and too bright, or the darks would get too dark and force the white sections to get dark. The projector seemed about correct with out-of-the-box settings on cinema.

I did not mess around with deeper menu’s such as the gamma, and film modes, or try changing the colors yet. I’m not experienced at self-calibrating, so don’t take my word for it, but I could not get the contrast portion much better then it already is out-of-the-box.

Auto-focus would have been a nice option. It’s not a big deal if you get this projector mounted and won’t have to keep moving it. You can just find the right spot and leave it there, and it should be fine. On that note, if you are planning to leave this on a coffee table it will probably work alright. At first, I tried to shelf-mount this projector to save having to buy a ceiling mount. I had it about 5 feet above ground-level and I could not get a picture I was happy with. I had to angle it way down by rotating the back legs so they were fully extended and then adding a couple slim-cd cases to raise the back even further. I adjusted keystone all the way and it was still off and looked like a trapezoid. Unless you plan on using this within 3 feet of the floor, I would expect to be ceiling mounting this baby! There’s your warning to anyone wondering about this.

None of my cons knock a star off my rating on this wonderful product though. You can’t really say too many negative things about a 1080p projector for <$1000!!

I am very glad I bought this! At first I was worried that 92″ might be too big for me, sitting back about 9.5 ft away, but having used it a while now, it is perfect. The projector will utilize up to a 300″ screen, so I cannot wait till I move into my first house and have a nice area to set up for a 150″ screen! I think that would be idea.

I’ve now owned this for about 7 months, and I have yet to run into any problems with it. I have over 400 hours of use on the bulb now. Once the bulb has had proper time to break in (200+) you will notice a better black level than when it was brand new. I don’t have any gripes with the performance of this projector. Everything has been fantastic. You really get all of your moneys worth with this sub-$1000 HD projector. I have only been out to see two movies in the theater so far this year, and I was the guy who usually went every Friday. I can stay home and get the same experience now.

You Can Check For Best Price At: www.amazon.com/Optoma-HD20

About the Author

Credit By: Mocowiz

problem with my projector, please help?

i have a projector – sanyo 1080p HD – that i watch movies with. It’s pretty new, probably around six months old and i’ve been careful with it. Anyway, the left side of the screen is one size and then the right side is smaller. Like i noticed the bottom of the screen slanting up so i thought one of the legs were off but then i noticed the top of the screen on that side slanting down. I dont know what happened and theres no way(as far as i know) to adjust indiviual sides of the screen, but only the screen as a whole. Does anyone know what the problem might be and how i could fix it since i dont want to send it to get fixed and wait all the time the company takes to do it?

If the screen is flat and vertical I would say you have the projector too far to the right of the screen (As a result the image would be pointed at the screen at an angle and the right side of the picture would be closer than the left, resulting in the image being higher on the left than the right).

Your question is a bit vague, but it sounds like the screen isn’t vertical/flat. If so you could get the effect you describe. In either case the problem is almost certainly not the projector … but either the screen or screen-projector physical relationship. Fix the screen or move the projector.

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