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Home Projector Optoma HD20 User Reviews!

Great For My First Projector

By fitfalcon

The Optoma HD20 is the first projector I have purchased. It looks fantastic shooting onto my homemade 100" screen. I have it hooked to my PS3 and HTPC. The picture is smooth playing video games or watching tv or movies, with no blur or trails. I am very happy with the results for the price. Two problems with this projector. First, you need a fairly dark room in order for it to look its best. With the sun out and the shades open the picture gets washed out pretty easy, which I expected for the price. Also, the black is mediocre, especially in night scenes. The second problem is that it does not have an audio output jack. I had to purchase an AV receiver so I could get sound output since everything is connected via HDMI. All in all for the price I love what the Optoma brings and would recommend to anyone looking for a low budget projector home theater projector

 

Optoma HD20 Home Projector

 

Optoma HD20 Home Theater

By D. JANECKE

I bought the HD20 to use as my main TV. I mounted it on the ceiling and our chairs are 14 feet back. I made a 80" diag screen out of smooth particle board and painted it with flat white paint, and a black boarder made out of milled 2x4's. I set it up in the basement, in a room the was designed as a home theater. I have a Dish-HD receiver. I'm very happy with the projector. All I can do is compare (by memory) it with the plasma sets at Best Buy. The picture is super sharp and colors are great (with a HD signal). I don't see any motion blur/artifacts that I see on LCD sets. I run it at the "low" lamp setting and it is very bright with one 13w CFL lamp in the back of the room by us. My wife can easily read if she wants to. The pixels (screen door effect) are first noticeable at about 1.5-2 feet from the screen. Bottom line is the money. The biggest TV at Best Buy is a 65" plasma at $2700. The HD20 was $1000 at Amazon with free shipping and my screen is bigger at 80". I think I made the right move.

Dave from Wisconsin

 

Great Value, Good Picture

By H "Bill"

The Family loves it, the picture is very good, no real problems setting it up if you plan before you install. We had to install a dedicted HDMI cable to the unit because the contractor that ran CAT5 screwed up and the baluns would not work on his cables; they did work on factory cables run outside the walls, but what good is that, might as well run new HDMI if you have to open up walls and ceiling. Black levals and contrast not as good as 51" plasma, but at 104" the picture size more than makes up for that. Sharpness and detail are excellent. No noticable RBE and noise is not a factor when viewing actual content at eco lamp settings; it does pick up quite a bit at shutdown, but only briefly. Sources are DMA2100 (1080P, 60hz), HD-A30 (1080P, 24hz) and WII (component input) passing through TX-SR606; no problem syncing with any source once the dedicated HDMI cable was installed. Ceiling mounted using Dayton PM105.

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

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Credit By: Mocowiz

Sharp AN-C55LP Projector Lamp

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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

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Credit By: Mocowiz

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