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 September 1, 2005 Optoma H79 DLP Projector
The reason so many people are converting to projectors instead of enclosed displays is obvious: screen size. In throwing a big picture, even a mediocre projector is capable of outperforming the best display. Do the math: A 55", 16:9 rear projector gives you 1293 square inches of screen, while a 100" projected picture has an area of 4273 square inches -- an increase of 330%, or more than three times as much picture. Projectors have another benefit in being mostly small and unobtrusive. A big Mitsubishi or Pioneer rear projector can take over a room; a DLP projector can be hidden on a bookshelf. The latest of the newer projector brands to cross our path is Optoma. Unless you’ve been a sales warrior schlepping your PowerPoint presentations from city to city, you may not have heard of the company. They’ve been around for about 15 years, making displays for business presentations and, more recently, for home theaters. Optoma is owned by megacorporation Coretronic, a Taiwanese firm whose primary business is building projectors for others to rebadge. Given the fact that Optoma is Coretronic’s in-house brand, I think it’s safe to assume that it gets the best technology and production facilities. Like many other companies around the world, Coretronic maintains its R&D base at home while slowly moving its manufacturing facilities to lower-cost areas -- in this case, mainland China. Where is Philippe Starck when you need him? The Optoma H79 has a list price of $10,000, but looking around the net, I found it as low as $4800, with an average price of around $5000. It arrives beautifully packed, capable of withstanding the wickedest UPS delivery brute. Two things about it that differ from other DLP projectors I’ve tested lately were immediately obvious. First, the H79’s case is plain and utilitarian; no attempt has been made to gussy it up. Its color is an off-white, which is probably useful for mounting it unobtrusively on most American ceilings. The edges and corners are rounded, but the H79 still looks like a big breadbox. Closer examination showed that the fit and finish are to a very high level. Maybe I should say that it’s like a Lexus ES, a car that does everything perfectly but that’s so bland no one notices it. The second thing I noticed was that the H79 is relatively heavy. I’ve had some DLPs that have been light enough to balance on my pinky; the H79 weighs about 17 pounds. A good deal of that weight comes from the largish case (17"W x 5"H x12"D), which is big for a good reason. One of the bugaboos of digital projectors is fan noise. Optoma’s engineers don’t like that, and have been very successful in damping the fan noise down to an almost whisper-quiet 23dB. However, the case itself is part of the H79’s heat-management system, and it runs quite hot. Don’t stack books around it; it needs room to breathe. All that damping also serves to reduce stray light, another common problem with digital projectors. The H79 does the best job of light management of any projector I’ve used to date. Still . . . couldn’t they have hired a good industrial designer and given it just a little flair? It’s what’s inside that counts Optoma has put just about every possible upscale addition you could hope for into the H79. They start with the Texas Instruments 720p, 12-degree DarkChip3 DLP chip. Unlike most other manufacturers, they guarantee that chip for two years with a zero dead-pixel warranty. If even one of the H79’s 921,600 pixels goes dead, they fix it or give you a new projector. That’s one of the benefits of having as your corporate parent one of the biggest manufacturers on earth. Like most manufacturers, Optoma lists unbelievable stats for brightness (1000 lumens) and contrast ratio (4500:1). It reminds me of the days when amplifier makers used to specify their power figures with such statements as "1000W instantaneous power at 1000Hz at .29% distortion" -- all this for a little stereo receiver. These spec wars are becoming insane. Still, it looks as if Optoma may be on to something. I’ll tell you later in detail what it looked like, but here’s a tip -- the H79 had both the brightest picture and the darkest blacks of any projector ever to reside in my house. Part of the reason is their proprietary 5x, eight-segment Dark Video Enhancement color-wheel technology. DVE is implemented by coloring two of the color wheel’s eight segments dark green. Besides making projectors, Coretronic is a huge manufacturer of lamps for video displays. So besides making the H79 run cool enough for a quiet fan and bright enough to make you take notice, they’ve also made a lamp with a typical life of 3000 hours, or about 50% better than the norm. Projectors’ connectivity is going to be a bigger and bigger problem. Even folks with simple systems now need at least two HDMI inputs, for an upscaling DVD player and a satellite or cable box. And who knows what the future will bring? Unless we get some help soon from the makers of preamplifier-processors and receivers, I foresee a few years of manual wire changing. Currently I have four pieces of gear vying for the H79’s single HDMI (HDCP-compliant) input. You also get component, S-video, and composite inputs, but once you’ve used HDMI, nothing ever again looks as good. I wished for a few more HDMIs. Setup is a snap Like all DLP projectors, the H79 is easy to set up, and very flexible in its throw distance. For a 100"-diagonal 16:9 screen, place the projector anywhere from 11.5’ to 15.5’ from the screen. From there, just make sure the projector is square to the screen and that the lens is within the top or bottom horizontal plane (depending on whether you mount it on the ceiling or a stand) and you’re halfway home. What makes the H79 even easier to set up than most is its wealth of adjustable settings. Power zoom and focus help immeasurably when you’re first setting everything up, giving you the ability to zero in on the perfect screen size and focus tightly on the best possible picture. And although I never recommend using them, it’s nice to know you have a good vertical lens shift along with vertical and horizontal keystone adjustments. There was one little problem. When I was setting up the H79, I went crazy for a good half hour trying to figure out how to turn the damn thing on. The red button on the remote control doesn’t do it, nor could I find a clue in the rather skimpy 31-page owner’s manual. Finally, I had to call tech support. As usual, I didn’t identify myself, but acted as if I were a normal customer. They apologized and said they’d been getting lots of calls about this very thing. The engineers had felt it best to leave the internal workings of the H79 on at all times, and to turn on and off only the lamp and its cooling fan. What they forgot to include in the manual are the facts that there is a switch to turn on the main power and another, smaller switch for the lamp. Here’s the secret: Over the main Power button on the H79’s rear right side is a small button, almost more of a detent, that you push to turn the bulb on. This needs to be done only once. After that, you can use the remote to turn the H79 on and off. With everything on, focused, and squared up, I got out my trusty Digital Video Essentials test DVD to set all the main color and light settings. The H79 has a pixel-to-pixel setting called Native, accessible via the remote’s Format key; using this with the Ayre DX-7 DVD player through the Optoma’s HDMI input gave the most unbelievable picture I’ve seen from a DVD in my home. Working my way through Joe Kane’s settings demonstrated to me that the Optoma engineers have figured out how to ship their projectors at very close to perfect spec. I made a few small changes here and there, but, in general, the H79 was accurate right out of the box. It was time to watch what it could do. From hoops to Hoop Dreams I sat down to do some critical watching and was immediately struck by the fact that the H79 made my eyes relax. It was like the time a salesman convinced me to step outside and put on a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses. My eyes went from a squint to total relaxation. I don’t know if it was lower levels of jitter from the H79’s proprietary color wheel, or the darker blacks, or the H79’s almost total lack of light spill, or the dramatically increased fill rate in the new TI chipset, or the accuracy of the color. What I do know is that I’d never experienced it before and can’t imagine living without it now. I spent a lot of time watching our local ABC affiliate. Their engineering is good, with a clean signal, and because it’s 720p, I could use the H79’s pixel-to-pixel feature and use the HDMI output from my HR10-250 TiVo/DirecTV receiver. The ladies of Wisteria Lane looked particularly fetching in various states of dress, as did Sydney Bristow. The shadow details on Alias, especially, came through with amazing clarity. But none of this prepared me for the most jaw-dropping high-definition programming I’ve yet seen. The 2005 NBA Championships not only featured two great teams, but ABC pulled out all the stops in using the best HD equipment they could lay their hands on. And though I’d been able to see other games on ESPN-HD, those broadcasts were compressed. The championships were full signal, and they looked stunning. With all the motion, rapid camera pans, vivid color overlays, graphics, and everything else that could potentially confuse the H79, there was nothing but net. It was gorgeous. My wife, not normally a lover of basketball but a big fan of Detroit’s Ben and Rasheed Wallace, poked me in the ribs after the opening tip. "Can we afford to buy this thing?" Another mind-blowing experience was watching the hi-def rebroadcast of the full first season of last year’s breakout hit series, Battlestar Galactica, on Universal HD. The producers must be pumping millions of dollars into this production. Everything from story to acting to directing to cinematography are better than 95% of what you see in theaters. Through the H79, the myriad dark scenes registered with total accuracy, and the ability to see those pesky "toasters" hiding in the dark added immeasurably to the fun. We’ve had some great projectors in our theater over the years, and it’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of the InFocus line for its combination of quality and value. But the Optoma H79 is from a different planet.
I was reviewing Hoop Dreams, a stellar film about passion, disappointment, heroics, and reprehensible behavior by school administrations. Though the DVD is mastered to the highest standards -- it’s from The Criterion Collection -- it got me thinking about the difference between a great DVD played through a top-of-the-line player like the Ayre DX-7, and how suddenly we can get a better picture from broadcast television. Who would have dreamed such a thing just a few years ago? Which is not to say that DVDs didn’t look great through the H79. I peeled through dozens: old black-and-white classics such as High Noon, in which the shadows in the barns during the gunfights were alive with depth and detail; dazzling costumers such as House of Flying Daggers, with its play of vertical forms and intense colors; and brightly lit romances such as Spanglish, in which the camera lovingly caresses Paz Vegas’ gorgeous skin. I tried running DVDs into the H79 at both 480i and 480p. While the Ayre DX-7 did just a bit better at the legwork, the H79 did just fine on its own. But is anyone going to spend $10,000 on a projector just to feed it a 480i signal? A Lexicon RT-20 is on its way here; I can’t wait to see how it does upconverting DVDs to 720p, then going native with the H79. That could be as close as we’ll get to HD from a DVD for at least a year or two. A no-brainer: this ranks as a Reviewers’ Choice I’m going to hate to see the H79 go. Every time I fire it up, I have the same reaction: I feel so soothed by its lack of distortion and so immersed in its incredible brightness and deep contrast that I lose track of the fact that I’m watching a home-theater projector. I just get lost in the picture. It doesn’t get any better than that. …Wes Marshall Optoma H79 DLP Projector Optoma USA E-mail: sales@optoma.com
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It’s
getting hard to follow all the high-end projector companies that have popped up recently.
Where there used to be only Runco and Sony and a few others, now such names as InFocus,
BenQ, Dwin, and Optoma are muscling in on the action. Add to these the dizzying array of
more familiar names that have joined the fray -- Marantz, Samsung, Sharp, Sim2, Yamaha,
etc. -- and the marketplace is getting downright crowded.
