The Perfect Vision
Optoma HD80 Additional Notes and Technical Ratings
Under the Hood | Adjustment Notes | Test Discs | Technical Ratings
Under the Hood
A Pixelworks video-processor chipset provides 10-bit processing for decoding, deinterlacing, scaling, image enhancement, and color. It also accepts 1080p/24, though such signals are displayed at 60Hz, defeating the purpose of 1080p/24. Part of the processor is called the Image AI-II, which automatically adjusts various picture elements depending on the content. Another processing function is called True Vivid, which increases the intensity of colors. As usual, I left these "enhancements" off, preferring to leave the picture in its more natural state.
The single 0.95-inch 1920x1080 DLP DMD chip produces the red, green, and blue portions of the picture with the help of a seven-segment color wheel, which includes one neutral-density segment to lower the black level. Optoma's patent-pending O2Air filter technology prevents dust from entering the projector with the air used for cooling.
Perhaps my favorite technical feature is the presence of both overscan and masking controls. This lets you defeat all overscanning and slightly crop the edges of the image when necessary to remove the digital hash that sometimes appears at the very top of pictures from cable or satellite.
Adjustment Notes
Some strange things happened during setup. First, the HDMI input started severely posterizing all images from HD DVD and DVD; unplugging and plugging the power to the projector fixed it. When setting the color saturation, all values above 50 did nothing. When setting sharpness, values from 1 to 7 steadily increased ringing, which disappeared at value 8, then increased again at value 15.
The color-temp presets did not change the grayscale measurements much at all, and all were well into blue; Warm was the closest to correct, though it was somewhat uneven. The projector offers a complete set of grayscale calibration controls in the user menu, but don't adjust these without the requisite training and equipment. It's hard to justify spending several hundred dollars to have a $3000 projector calibrated, but it would bring the grayscale much closer to correct. Closing the iris down to its minimum setting achieved an excellent black level and a respectable peak white level.
Test Discs
On the HQV Benchmark DVD at 480i, detail was excellent, and jaggies were very mild; the waving flag looked quite smooth. Noise reduction was effective without softening the picture, and the processor picked up 3:2 pulldown fairly quickly, though there was a bit of residual flickering in the bleachers as the race car drives past.
Switching to the HQV Benchmark HD DVD at 1080i, both the video and film resolution loss tests were solid as a rock, with no flickering in either one (except for an occasional momentary hiccup when the pattern changed direction in the film test). Microsoft engineer Stacey Spears' test disc revealed that the processor picked up 3:2 pulldown at 1080i quickly and reliably, and the montage of images looked great, with no moiré distortion in the screen door and clean moving diagonals.
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