Optoma HD20

I first wrote this review on another site, and now that I've had more time with this projector I have added and changed a few things and am reposting the review on Amazon. I think more people will look to… Amazon when purchasing this projector, especially since the other site is not stocking it anymore. 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. 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

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I am fortunate to have purchased a house that had an unfinished 300 sq ft basement that I immediately identified as my new media room. I pre-wired for 7.1 surround sound and then began the search for my… projector. After weeks of searching, I came across the HD20. The few reviews I could find swayed me to purchase (along with the

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I bought the Optoma HD20 to show backyard movies and it has really worked well. The sub $1000 price point was key to the purchase. We put together some 1080 home movies made from a Canon HF-10 and played… via a blu-ray disc on a Sony PSP-- the results were spectacular. We were cautioned by one of the projector web retailers that the HD20 would not look as good as one of the $2-3K units and we did not do any A-B comparisons but I think, short of being someone's dedicated "reference" home theater, the HD20 would do just fine. We mounted it to a Peerless universal ceiling mount and the two work OK together. I gave it a less than perfect rating because the plastic housing seems a bit flimsy. Another reason is that the unit sometimes has difficulty locking onto the HDMI signal. It eventually gets there after a minute or two and it has never failed so far, but I do wonder if one day it will refuse the connection. But the picture! It was like being at the theater or maybe, the drive-in (remember those?), in my backyard! Good job Optoma.

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Not an expert review, but from an experienced user: I have been using this projector for about a week now, and so far so good. I did quite a bit of research on HD projectors and found that this was the… best one for the price. Does not fully match up to the more expensive HD projectors, but quite comparable. Colors are deep and good. Images are vibrant and do not wash out as much as I had expected (even in a reasonably lit room). Fan is somewhat loud (but inaudible if you have a sound system working), and can get somewhat warm if you sit to the right of it. Great purchase overall.

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