Overview

In the $5K and under price range, single chip DLP choices have been few and far between. The Optoma 8200 is targeted directly at this niche and is packed with many features designed to make for a very compelling buy. Here is a quick overview of the rich feature set:


Dynamic Black (DB) - an exciting new contrast enhancement technology (more on that later).
New TI .65" DC3 DMD that helps to reduce cost and also the long throw requirements of typical 1-chip DLP projectors.
6x/6-Segment color wheel which helps to minimize rainbows.
Quiet operation (24db economy / 26db standard setting)
ISF friendly with RGB gain and offset settings available in the user menus
Adjustable horizontal and vertical lens shift
1.48:1-2.28:1 throw range.
Pure motion enhancement (reduces motion judder and motion blur - more on that later).
Bright mode for applications where ambient light may be present.
Several different gamma curves and gamma settings
Noise Reduction
PureDetail
PureColor
Multiple display formats (16:9, 4:3, letterbox, etc.).
Superwide (more on this later).
Image AI (A lamp modulation scheme - more on that later).
2 12V triggers. One is a standard trigger for a screen, while the second is a selectable trigger than can be used to control an anamorphic lens based on source aspect ratio.
Auto235 - A nice feature that automatically detects when 2.35:1 content is being displayed and will activate the lens and format the image automatically for a 2.35;1 CIH setup.
Standard and bright lamp modes.
2 remotes
Lots of interfaces (VGA, DVI, HDMI, component, S-video, etc.).
And much more!


http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/DSCN0835.JPG

Viewing impressions
People who have followed my posts know that I have avoided most 1-chip DLP projectors because I see rainbows and find them to be distracting. For this reason most of my viewing perspective has tended to come from the LCOS camp and I currently use a JVC RS20 and before that a JVC RS1. If you think that this is going to sway me away from the 8200 however, I think you'll find some surprises as you read further into this review.

The first three things that I noticed when I plugged in the Optoma were: 1) Wow this thing is very quiet, amazingly quiet considering the fact that it has a 6x color wheel and also a dynamic iris. 2) Rainbows while sometimes noticeable were tamed to the point where I could easily be happy with this unit in my home theater. The first 1-chip DLP projector where I felt the same way with was a Marantz 11S1 which also has a 6x color wheel. The Optoma provides this 6x color wheel for a much lower price point than it's more expensive 1-chip brother however. 3) It delivers a beautiful and vibrant image, with lots of depth in bright and mixed scenes which is something that DLP is known for.

Initially I started viewing with the medium color temperature setting, but this looked colder than D65 so I spent some time calibrating the unit as discussed in the calibration section. After settling on the warm color setting and calibrating the unit to D65 at this setting, I settled in for some extended viewing.

Colors
The 8200 color gamut is shown below. As can be seen, the color primaries are significantly oversaturated and also slightly skewed in hue. The most interesting result of this gamut is what happens to deeply saturated reds. The hue takes on a very deep "red wine" hue that while technically not very accurate is an interesting and unique color of red that many people might find appealing. The hue of deeply saturated reds is very unique to the 8200 and is the one aspect of color that makes the 8200 stand out from other displays.

I found that skin tones tended to be pushed a little red so I reduced the color setting about 5 notches which helped to mute the slight oversaturation and made the skin tones look a bit more natural. While not technically color accurate, I found that this improved the colors and I wasn't distracted by colors while viewing. I think most users will find the colors on the 8200 to be rich and vibrant, although, true videophiles including many AVS forum members with experience with color accurate displays and displays with a color management system will find the colors to be a little pushed.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/gamut_cal.bmp

Sharpness
Another thing that I was curious to take a look at is the sharpness of this unit to see how the new .65" DC3 DMD compares as far as sharpness to other projectors at competing price points. Being a 1-chip DLP, the 8200 suffers from none of the issues of 3-chip panel alignment, it has no convergence or color bleeding issues for example. Resolution test patterns like the blu-ray test pattern below look very good.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/DSCN0818.JPG

Viewers familiar with the BD test pattern know that the finest detail on the test pattern is the text that appears at the very bottom. I've included a close up so that viewers can see how well it resolves this pattern:

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/P1000503.JPG

The optics looks very good, particularly so considering the price range, although I did notice a softness at the extreme edges of the lens. Detail at the center is excellent however. The overall resolution isn't on par with top-end 1-chip DLPs that use a larger .95" DMD and expensive Konica-Minolta optics, but the 8200 also costs almost 1/3rd the price of say a Marantz VP-11S2. Overall, I'd rate the sharpness as being very good and not a limiting factor in the performance of the system.

Below are some more photos taken from a Windows desktop.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/screen1.jpg

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/screen2.jpg


I was also curious to see how the new .65" DC3 chip stacks up as far as sharpness against the same size chip used in JVC DILA projectors. Rather than take up time in this review however, I'm going to discuss the details in another thread devoted to this interesting issue. I'll just summarize the results here by saying that the screen door grid looked nearly identical between the projectors. So long as convergence is very good on a 3-chip RS10 or RS20, their shaprness performance is very similar to an 8200.

Compared to an RS1, the optics on the 8200 is better. Compared to a well converged RS10 or RS20 however, the 8200 is about the same at the center of the image. The optics on a good RS20 or RS10 is sharper across the full field though because as mentioned earlier, the 8200 is slightly softer at the edges.

What I found most interesting however, is that while resolution test patterns look very similar between a well converged RS20, the images between the projector look a little different when video content is displayed and the 8200 seems a little sharper. As I discuss below, I attribute some of this to much higher ANSI contrast on the 8200, which delivers about 3x the contrast as the RS20.

ANSI Contrast
The 8200 delivers excellent ANSI contrast performance. It delivered a modified ANSI (single center probe position) contrast of 735:1 at close to long throw. In my opinion the excellent ANSI contrast of this projector sometimes gives the image more depth in bright and occasional mixed scenes and a more vibrant and dynamic look in those same scenes than projectors with lower ANSI contrast. When watching the Super Bowl on the 8200 for example, the NBC logo just seemed to hang suspended above the screen.

Not every scene had added depth, but every once in awhile a scene would come along that was stunning. Usually it would be a bright scene with some dark content where there is an abrupt change in luminance. The higher ANSI contrast handled these abrupt luminance changes better and seemed to contribute more depth in those scenes.

After living with the 8200 for awhile and comparing it head to head with an RS1 and RS20, it's my belief that it's the ANSI contrast that gives DLP the "pop" and "wow" factor that people use when discussing DLP. In dark scenes however, the situation was reversed and LCOS machines can (depending on the scene) have more depth and "Pop" due to their higher on/off contrast. Also not in every scene, but usually in dark scenes with small amounts of bright content. The end of the second Harry Potter movie is a good example of the sorts of scenes that look stunning on an RS20.

The combination of High ANSI and average on/off contrast performance
The 8200 also represents an interesting case where the projector has high ANSI contrast, but fairly average on/off contrast. My expectation before viewing the 8200 is that the relatively low on/off would render most scenes relatively flat looking because of the elevated black level. Film being a dark medium seems to favor projectors with very good on/off, at least that was my belief. After viewing the 8200, I was surprised to see how good the image was and how the on/off seemed to be much higher than it measured. If I hadn't known better I would have assumed that it was delivering at least 15k:1 or thereabouts, but with Cinema1 it only measured in at about 6.5k:1. I think the high ANSI contrast helps in this perception of blacks in that it allows the blacks to be as good as they can be in the presence of surrounding luminance. There isn't a hidden veil for example that might prevent blacks from reaching their best.

An Examination of Dynamic Black (DB)
One of the key features of the Optoma is it's use of dynamic black to enhance contrast and improve blacks. According to Optoma, dynamic black makes no use of dynamic gamma which is common in Sony and other dynamic iris equipped projectors. Instead it boosts brightness by increasing and modulating the lamp intensity while simultaneously decreasing the iris aperture. In principle this sounds intriguing because it implies boosting something akin to native contrast. By comparison, dynamic contrast technologies that rely on an iris and dynamic gamma, gain improvements to black levels and contrast at the bottom of the luminance range by trading off some luminance and therefore contrast at the top of the luminance range. This can be done to various degrees, but the premise is always the same, a benefit to shadow detail and black levels at the expense of some brightness compression at the higher end of the luminance range. So let's take a look at the Optoma implementation of dynamic black and see if the same sort of tradeoffs exist. First let's look at the on/off metrics:

The sequential contrast for the 3 settings are shown below:
DB=off 2003:1
DB=Cinema1 6482:1
DB=Cinema2 7830:1

It was interesting to note that the on/off in all of these settings is well below the advertised 20k:1 spec. Optoma indicated that Cinema2 should be delivering closer to 10k:1 so this particular unit may have lower than spec'ed on/off. It was a random unit and not hand picked.

As some people may know I'm a firm believer in supplementing on/off measurements with other measurements that measure intra-image contrast at low APL levels because on/off measurements alone provide little clues about what is going on with intra-image contrast with dynamic technologies. It's unclear for example if an iris is simply reducing the light output from a projector to get an improvement in on/off or if it simultaneously boosts whites as the iris is reduced which would provide real intra-image contrast benefits as the iris aperture is engaged.

In order to better gauge the effect of DB, I used two methods to gauge the effects. One is a very small area 20 step greyscale which has a very low APL. The test pattern quickly shows what will happen to an image with a simultaneous mix of greys from full black to full white. The second is a suite of small area test patterns that have a very low APL which can be used to get a feel for intra-image contrast by measuring both the black level and the intensity of white from 0-100% stimulus in steps of 10% (and also 1%, 2% and 5% steps to gain information on shadow contrast).

It's important to mention that this test pattern suite is very dark with the intent being to measure the contrast behavior when the dynamic technology is providing maximum boost and therefore maximum benefit. The actual degree of contrast enhancement with real content will therefore be somewhere in the range where the contrast enhancement is disabled (no boost) up to the degree of enhancement displayed by these test patterns.

Method 1 - DB Greyscale
The greysccale test pattern used is the one below, but it should be noted that the area of the test pattern is much smaller than the image suggests and it's surrounded by video black.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/avs/low apl - 20 step greyscale.gif

Cycling between DB=off and the two dynamic black modes produced very noticeable changes to the low APL greyscale test pattern. Using DB=0ff as a guide, each 5 IRE increment to the greyscale was very discernible from the others and the greyscale looked perfect.

With DB enabled in Cinema1 mode, The whites from 80-100% were completely crushed and were not discernible from each other. As shown below:

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/DSCN0800.JPG

The camera has added some additional white crush to 75%stiim whites that wasn't really there. I should also mention that the greyscale test pattern is actually two reversed ramps so that it's easy to see what is happening in the bright ranges and the dark ranges while they are both in close proximity to one another. (Note: I should give credit for this nicety to William Phelps who helped immensely when I developed the dynamic contrast test patterns).

The cinema2 setting seemed to fair better and while some of the whites were crushed, it was still possible to discern most of the 5% greyscale increments.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/DSCN0805.JPG

Method 2 - Dynamic Contrast Measurements using low APL Intra-Image test patterns
It's interesting to note that the results of the low APL intra-image contrast measurements didn't exactly match with the results of the greyscale test pattern used above. Both are very low APL benchmarks, but I think that the reason for the difference may be the fact that the greyscale test pattern contains a mix of whites and the DB algorithm may treat it a little differently than each of the intra-image test patterns which contain only black and a specific intensity of white at each point along the curve. This goes to show how difficult it is to characterize something as complicated as dynamic contrast and rather than attempting to completely characterize DB what we are doing is providing additional insight. The fact that the results differ slightly isn't really a problem as it provides the benefit of seeing how the iris/lamp modulation algorithm treats different source content.

Dynamic Luminance
First let's take a look at what happens with the white level with dark content with the various test patterns:

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/image029.gif

The key thing that can be seen from this graph is that even in dark scene performance, the whites are very bright and the combination of lamp modulation and iris reduction is even brighter (over 15%!) than with DB disabled. This is a key benefit that can't be understated as other dynamic technologies like a Sony DI have significantly reduced brightness when the iris aperture is reduced. This is because dynamic gamma alone does not provide sufficient boost in the higher IRE ranges to make up for the loss of light from the iris aperture reduction.

For comparison, the graph below shows what happens with the Sony DI implementation on a VW50. The graph was taken using the identical test patterns and methodologies. As can be seen, 100 IRE white can be reduced by as much as 2/3rds once the iris apeture is reduced.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/image022.gif

Dynamic Contrast
Next let's take a look at what happens with contrast along the curve. The graph below shows the intra-image contrast in a dark image as grey is swept from 0-100%.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/image027.gif

As we saw on the greyscale test pattern, the contrast in the upper registers (>70%) flattens out and we see this behavior with these dynamic contrast test patterns also. It's also interesting to note that the curve is not smooth and has pronounced dips and points. These dips and points were reproducible and not related to noisy data or measurement inaccuracies. It's possible that unlike dynamic gamma based technologies, dynamic black may be a little more difficult to control and lamp variances combined with the iris behavior may be difficult to calibrate and control precisely.

What's also possible is that we may be seeing the lamp/iris modulation change as luminance is stepped. There is no guarantee for example that when a test pattern is displayed with 100% whites, that the iris/lamp combination will remain unchanged when the same exact test pattern is used with say 50% whites. Using a very small area test pattern as these do helps to minimize this risk because the images are very dark, but the iris/lamp algorithm may still handle small amounts of bright whites differently even though the overall darkness of the image doesn't change significantly from test pattern to test pattern. By comparison the Sony VW50 DI seemed to view the test patterns consistently and it applied what seems to be the combination of maximum amount of dynamic gamma and smallest iris aperture consistently with each test pattern in the suite..

Regardless however, it's still very easy to compare relative results using the same test pattern suite and see the improvement gains. As we can see the intra-image contrast improvements are significant and in some ranges a greater than 6X improvement in intra-image contrast is being measured. Unlike a DI implementation however, there is also a large amount of benefit to bright whites also.

For comparison purposes, I've included a graph of the same data also taken from a Sony VW50. It shows how smooth the graph is, as apparently, the combination of dynamic gamma and iris reduction is easier to predict or control, or perhaps because the combination of dynamic gamma and iris aperture remains unchanged for each point along the curve.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/image013.gif

The last thing that I'll show is a comparison of intra-image black level using the same suite of test patterns used above. This graph shows the large benefit to black level that DB can provide. Up to a 4X reduction in intra-image black level can be seen. It's also interesting to note the dip between 50% and 80% stimulus which is responsible for the corresponding peaks and dips in the contrast graph. As mentioned above, this dip is reproducible and it looks like what is happening is the lamp/iris modulation does not remain fixed as the white is stepped in this region.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/image030.gif

By comparison the DI algorithm in a VW50 views the dynamic contrast test pattern suite consistently and does not change its iris setting across the range. The fact that the two implementations differ in their response to the same test pattern is not an issue, it does however need to be explained why the data looks a little differently between the two implementations.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/image021.gif

Subjective Viewing perceptions of DB
Now that we've delved into the details of DB, let's talk about the subjective benefits to contrast that DB is capable of delivering. Based on the measurement data, the Cinema2 setting looks like it would yield the best images. It has better shadow contrast in the 0-50% range and the greyscale test pattern also showed that it had less brightness compression in the >70% range.

Unfortunately, however, this mode is mated to an agressive iris/lamp algorithm that makes itself too apparent when watching real content. In some relatively static scenes for example, the camera may be stationary and there may be little movement, but the iris/lamp modulation may change and be a little distracting. For this reason I recommend the Cinema1 mode only. The cinema1 mode provides a good reduction in black level and improvement in contrast but it's much less noticeable than Cinema2.

Overall, with most content I didn't notice the iris change very often with Cinema1 and when I did, it was usually just a split second after an abrupt scene change as the iris was settling in. If I watched a dark movie where the iris is working almost all of the time and where the lighting is dynamic within a fairly static scene ("Dark City" for example), I would notice the iris and lamp modulation in the occassional scene, but overall I would say that this mode works pretty well.

EDIT: One thing that I'll also mention is during normal viewing I never noticed any brightness compression or clipped whites with regular content. The test patterns used are intentionally designed to represent an extreme case of the darkest possible content that is easily measured, which will generally correspond to the case of maximum dynamic contrast. This was designed so that the maximum benefit of dynamic contrast can be measured. During regular viewing there is likely less dynamic contrast being used and any white crush if it existed was not detected during normal viewing.

Calibration
After noticing that the medium color temp was shifted blue (high), I broke out my colorimeter and measured 9500K which is very high and probably close to the native color temp of the UHP lamp. Sometimes manufacturers push the color temp high because this helps to maximize lumens and give the impression that the unit is brighter than others that adhere to D65. The "warm" color temp measured about 7800 at 100 IRE which is still very high so I calibrated the unit using the warm setting in conjunction with the "User" mode and standard gamma. I'll include the calibration details below in the off chance that others will find it useful. The uncalibrated graphs can be seen below:

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/color_temp_uncal.bmp

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/RGB_uncal.bmp

As can be seen white was shifted towards blue which yields a high color temperature and I initially tried to get it to D65 by reducing blue only. Unfortunately once a color is reduced below a certain level on the 8200, it no longer seems to work effectively and can impact the other colors so I had to find a good compromise by increasing red and green while also reducing blue. Once I figured out the blue limitation, the rest of the calibration was done pretty quickly. I probably could have spent longer and fine tuned it more, but for the purposes of this review a quick calibration was all that was needed.

The final greyscale color temp and gamma can be seen below:

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/color_temp_cal.bmp

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/gamma_cal.bmp

Others may find the default and calibrated settings useful so I will provide those here:
Default red,green, blue gain: (4, 0, 3)
Calibrated red, green, blue gain: (5, 2, -4)

Default red, green, blue bias: (0, -1, 0)
Calibrated red, green, blue bias: (0, -1, -1)

I also noticed that the gain and offset settings do not work globally across interfaces (HDMI-2 for example) or across modes (Cinema for example). So a person will need to calibrate each of those separately.

HDMI Levels
Optoma passes blacker than black (<16) and white than white (>235) video levels. I did find it a little difficult to dial in the brightness and contrast settings exactly though. For example, One click on the brightness setting would cause the video levels to either crush a few levels above 16 or elevate some of the blacks below 16.

Unfortunately there isn't a HDMI video level shift setting so that PC or video levels can be specified. For this reason I found it difficult to calibrate the greyscale luminance on a HTPC. The brightness and contrast settings were even more difficult to dial in exactly when using a HTPC and it often seemed as though whiter than whites were being clipped.

I did run into one issue related to setting the brightness and contrast settings. After the unit was calibrated and the brightness and contrast settings were set on HDMI-1, I connected a HTPC to HDMI-2 and calibrated that interface. When I went back to HDMI-1 the video levels had changed and the original brightness and contrast settings no longer applied. Later the video levels inexplicably shifted again and the original brightness and contrast settings were correct again.

Measurements
One note about lumens, ANSI and on/off contrast. Lens throw plays a role in all of these numbers, but in a sometimes mutually exclusive relationship. For example, lumens at shortest throw will usually be maximized but at the expense of on/off contrast which is typically better in longest throw. So rather than play the numbers game, I measured everything at the same consistent throw which was convenient with my setup and which works out to close to longest throw distance. Most of these numbers were also measured with about 20 hrs on the lamp.

Lumens
Low Lamp: 461 lumens (after D65 calibration)
High Lamp: 560 Lumens (after D65 calibration)
There is also a bright mode which uses a color temperature closer to the native UHP temperature and resulted in about 6% more brightness above high lamp mode (~600 lumens). This compares favorably with a JVC RS20 which delivered 535 lumens in high lamp mode, iris open with identical throw. It does however fall well short of the spec'ed lumens of 1300.

One comment about the high lamp mode. It's not documented in the manual, but AI mode requires additional lamp headroom and is not compatible with the high lamp mode. Once high lamp mode is enabled, the menu selection for AI is removed rather than greyed out, so knowing this can avoid some confusion. I also assume that the two dynamic black modes (Cinema1 and Cinema2) also require lamp headroom, although I was able to enable both of these modes along with high lamp. It's unclear what happens when both of these modes are enabled.

Comparison with JVC RS1 and RS20
The Optoma sales representative that I initially spoke with encouraged comparisons of the 8200 against the RS1 so I decided to take him up on it and compare the 8200 head-to-head with both a JVC RS1 and RS20.

http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/DSCN0809.JPG

8200 vs RS1
As I mentioned earlier, I've tended to favor LCOS over the years because of a lack of rainbow artifacting. So I'm very familiar with what the technology can do and I've owned most of the JVC projectors over the years (G11, SX-21, HD2K, RS1 and RS20), I've put well over 1000 hrs on a RS1 and I'm working on my second hundred hrs on a RS20. The RS1 that I have is not the best as far as on/off, measuring only 9800:1 on/off in a little less than longest throw. Overall, I thought the blacks on the 8200 looked about equal to the RS1, probably because the high ANSI contrast helps to improve the crispness of blacks even though the on/off contrast is slightly less. In brighter scenes though, I thought that the 8200 was noticeably better than the RS1. It had more depth in bright scenes on average than the RS1.

The 8200 did throw an occasional rainbow and this was more prevalent in dark scenes of movies than when watching video content like a football game. The iris was also noticeable in the occasional scene but the RS1 also has some issues. It has slight yellow banding in white field uniformity and it has a color shifting artifact that was sometimes noticeable. Overall, I was surprised to find that I preferred the 8200 compared to the RS1 mainly because of the depth from the much higher ANSI contrast.

8200 vs RS20
The RS20 that I have has excellent convergence, excellent full field sharpness and measured 27k:1 on/off with the iris wide open and 44k:1 with the iris aperture reduced. Blacks are clearly crisper on the RS20 than the 8200 and it has a noticeably lower black level. Blacks still looked good on the 8200, but in dark scenes the RS20 was clearly superior. The RS20 also has excellent white field uniformity and no color shifting artifacts. Overall I preferred the image on the RS20 but one thing that surprised me was that after living with the 8200 for awhile, I was shocked to find that I could sometimes perceive a slight haze to the image in some scenes that I hadn't noticed until I had spent a lot of time with the 8200.

In close to long throw the RS20 measures only about 220:1 in ANSI contrast which is a drop from the 308:1 that the RS1 has and much less than the 735:1 that the 8200 has. In some scenes I could see a slight veiling haze to the image that the 8200 doesn't have and I attribute this to the lower ANSI contrast on the RS20. The 8200 clearly had more depth in some bright scenes than the RS20. In fact, after viewing the two projectors I came to the conclusion that the best thing that JVC could do to the RS20 is follow Sony's lead and improve the ANSI contrast to 400:1+ or thereabouts. I still
prefer the RS20. but now that I've viewed the 8200 I'm less ecstatic with it than I was before and I've become aware of the chink in the RS20 armor.

Other notes about DILA vs the 8200
Motion blur seemed about the same on the two projectors when PureMotion was disabled on the 8200. Once PureMotion was enabled on the low setting though, the 8200 had less judder and motion blur than either of the JVC's.

I did notice added dithering noise on the 8200 in particular with dark content. The noise reduction feature on the 8200 helped to reduce this though. I didn't find the slight amount of dithering noise distracting though so I usually used the 8200 with the noise reduction set to off.

A look at some of the interesting features

AI
AI is a lamp only modulation feature where the brightness of the lamp is changed depending on the scene. The implementation on the 8200 seemed to react too slowly to scene changes however and after an abrupt scene change there was about a 2 second delay before the lamp would flicker and change intensity. This was very distracting and I quickly turned it off and I think that most others will also disable this feature.

Pure Motion
This is a great feature that reduces both motion blur and judder. Optoma uses the Pixelwork PW9800 chipset to perform frame insertion and it has various settings where a user can increase motion smoothness but at the expense of additional artifacting.

The results are immediately noticeable in the high setting and can have a pronounced affect on 24hz film sources. For those who are old enough to remember the fluid motion in daytime soap operas on broadcast TV using CRT, will understand the effect that I'm talking about. The high setting makes film sources look a bit soap operaish. On the low setting, the effect is much more subtle, but it is still effective at reducing motion blur and judder.

One of the best features of Pure Motion is a split screen demo mode which is the best way of seeing the differences from Pure Motion settings. The split screen demo mode is also a great way to get a feel for motion blur and judder in general and I hope more members get a chance to demo this mode and gain a better understanding of both judder and blur.

Pure motion wasn't without some issues however, I did notice that fast motion coupled with pure motion set to high can produce what looks like ghost images. Sometimes there was also a scene with a noticeable, but brief pause to the motion. In these scenes, the projector didn't seem to be able to maintain smooth motion at all times and the artifact looked like an instant of severe motion judder in between smooth periods which seemed to accentuate the problem.

Overall though, the low setting worked very well and was a great feature that I wish more manufacturers would add.

PureColor
PureColor adds additional color saturation to the image. The color primaries on the 8200 are already oversaturated to begin with however, so adding additional saturation makes the colors less realistic and too over the top. What would have been a great feature would be to mate this feature along with color acccurate primaries (or a color accurate preset) so that a user could select between a color accurate mode and various degrees of oversaturation. This is an area that would be great to see Optoma explore in the future.

SuperWide
The Optoma Superwide feature relies on a 2.0:1 aspect ratio screen. 2.0:1 AR screens have many positives and will be something that will gain in popularity in the future. I'm going to start another thread soon to discuss 2.0:1 screens and also share some information that I received from Anthony Grimani, the President of PMI while visiting Stewart Filmscreen this past week. For now though, I'll just focus on Optoma's implementation of Superwide which utlizes the 2.0:1 AR screen format.

Optoma's Superwide feature provides both constant image height and constant image area on a 2.0:1 AR screen by cropping the top and bottom of a 16x9 active image area to fit within the 2.0:1 screen area. A 1920x1080 image is cropped to 1920x960. Similarly, a 2.35:1 active image area is scaled vertically while the sides are cropped to yield the 2.0:1 AR.

In both cases very little image area is lost (5% with 16x9 images and 7% on each side with 2.35:1 images) which shows one of the benefits of a 2.0:1 AR screen. One of the chief benefits of the Optoma implementation is that an anamorphic lens is not needed, nor is zooming of the lens required. Scaling of 2.35:1 images is needed, but the Optoma provides that internally.

As I mentioned, 2.0:1 AR screens are something that we wil be seeing in the future and it's good to see a company like Optoma begin to use features that utilize this novel screen aspect ratio.

I'm including a link to a powerpoint image that was given to me by Optoma that shows how this mode is used:

Optoma Superwide powerpoint diagram (http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/optoma_8200/SuperWide Presentation Final.ppt)

B/W Extension
This feature is described in the manual as a black and white extension setting that maximizes contrast. These sorts of featues can wreak havoc by crushing blacks and whites and generally ruining a well calibrated greyscale. I looked for this feature in the 8200 but couldn't find it and found out from Optoma that it had been removed just before the units had shipped. So if you can't find it, now you know why.

Issues
I did run into some issues with the 8200 that I should mention. The first one that I noticed was when displaying an ANSI test pattern. The lamp would flicker and go black for a split second and this would cycle about once every minute or thereabouts. This made taking contrast measurements a PITA and it also adds a source of error into the measurements because a stable lamp is necessary for accurate contrast results. Optoma is aware of this problem and is addressing it.

I also noticed when displaying an ANSI contrast test pattern that after the lamp had flickered, that the lamp intensity did not come back up to what it had been. After resetting all of the parameters and power cycling the unit the lamp intensity came back up and I was able to measure contrast values on par with what I had done previously, but it does indicate that sometimes the lamp modulation might not work as it should.

A similar thing happened when taking on/off measurements, after taking on/off for all of the DB settings, I repeated the tests and the iris worked a little inconsistently the second time around and the Cinema1 and Cinema2 settings yielded only slightly better numbers than DB=0ff. The white point was about the same but the blacks were elevated indicating that the iris hadn't engaged.

I never noticed either of these issues happening with anything other than sequential or ANSI test patterns though so it may be related to displaying static test patterns only and may not be somethiing that users will typically run into.

As I also mentioned, there was also the issue with video levels changing when different input interfaces were selected. For example, I would calibrate the unit for HDMI-1 and then do the same later for HDMI-2. When returning to HDMI-1 the brightness and contrast settings would still be what I had set them to but the image would be too dark and completely crushed.

All of these units have been reported to Optoma and I hope that they provide a firmware fix in the future.

Screenshots
Nope you won't find any beautiful screenshots in this review other than the photos I've posted above. The reason for this is that it's too easy to be misled by good or bad screenshots. Too many times I've seen great screenshots for example that seem to show lots of contrast and great blacks with projectors that have poor contrast and it gives an incorrect perception of the images that the projector is capable of throwing. Similarly, I've also seen bad screenshots that can make a good projector look bad.

Conclusions
The 8200 provides a ton of features at a very compelling price point. It renders most images with a very vibrant look and delivers a lot of depth into many bright and mixed scenes. It's quiet and reduces rainbow artifacts to a level that even rainbow sensitive viewers can tolerate. It delivers excellent ANSI contrast and as we have seen, it includes dynamic black technology which can improve intra-image contrast by as much as 6x while reducing black levels by almost a factor of 4X. The 8200 delivers a lot of performance for the price. The only real downside is a few software issues that need to be resolved which Optoma will hopefully take care of in the near future.

A $10,000 review for a 5k projector...nice
It that's not the best review in AVS history I don't know what is..(sorry Jason).


But the question is do I buy it?:D

Mark did Optoma give any timeline on when they are going to fix the software issues. Somewhere I did read that AVS was selling 8200 but had 100% returns on this units... how good is Optoma in resolving this issues.... if the PJ is as good as you are saying they better fix it and get in the game or they will always be playing catchup rather than gaining some momentum....I hope they fix all the issues by the time I am in market for my next PJ..

P.S. THANKS FOR THE REVIEW...

Mark can you please be a little more specific in your review? Thx

Mark, could you just confirm for me that the AR modes (specifically the 4:3/horizontal squish) work for HD/1080p sources? I was really close to buying an FPJ1 the other day until I realized it's AR controls are quite limited with HD sources.

A $10,000 review for a 5k projector...nice
It that's not the best review in AVS history I don't know what is..(sorry Jason).

My thoughts exactly :)

Mark did Optoma give any timeline on when they are going to fix the software issues. Somewhere I did read that AVS was selling 8200 but had 100% returns on this units...

No, the comment in the other thread was to make sure that when you buy it you get it from a place with a good return policy in case you get a bad one.

Mark, I'd be interested on your take of what animation and live concerts look like on the 8200 with motion flow on and set to high. My Epson 7500 blows away both my gamma corrected G90, Marquee 8500 (LC), and Samsung 5281F for this type of material with frame interpolation on - animation in particular is a show stopper and has left many jaws on the ground. I like this look better than the IMAX 3D (not so gimmicky).

Amazing review! Thanks.

It very disappointing that the native on: off is not better than than. My old Optoma H77 was at 2800:1. My old Sharp XV-Z20000 with both iris close has 6500:1.

I just hope it is a defective unit.

Very good review by the way! Loved it.

Thanks for the kind words guys.

Mark did Optoma give any timeline on when they are going to fix the software issues.

I've received no feedback so far on when or if the software will be fixed.

Mark, could you just confirm for me that the AR modes (specifically the 4:3/horizontal squish) work for HD/1080p sources? I was really close to buying an FPJ1 the other day until I realized it's AR controls are quite limited with HD sources


Unfortunately I don't have the unit anymore, the AR modes for Superwide worked fine so I assume the AR modes will work okay.


Mark, I'd be interested on your take of what animation and live concerts look like on the 8200 with motion flow on and set to high. My Epson 7500 blows away both my gamma corrected G90, Marquee 8500 (LC), and Samsung 5281F for this type of material with frame interpolation on - animation in particular is a show stopper and has left many jaws on the ground. I like this look better than the IMAX 3D (not so gimmicky).


The high setting creates too many artifacts for my tastes but usually only when there is fast motion. So it will be probably work well with live concerts, but artifact more with animation. The low or medium settings will still give the fluid look that you're looking for though.

I wish that I had thought of watching an animated movie with motion flow enabled while I had the unit. The high ANSI contrast and fluid motion would be really noticeable with that sort of content. Definitely a jaw dropper. Dang! I wish you had asked me while I still had the unit :)

"I would calibrate the unit for HDMI-1 and then do the same later for HDMI-2. When returning to HDMI-1 the brightness and contrast settings would still be what I had set them to but the image would be too dark and completely crushed. "

This sounds like it's reverting between video and PC brightness levels. The H79 did something like this, DVI would be video brightness and resync would send it to PC brighness levels. I remember I had a problem with black crush on video BL so I had to hit the resync button and tune the PC BL to avoid the black crush. They'll have to figure out what's making it switch.

Interesting review, allot of work :)
thanks

This sounds like it's reverting between video and PC brightness levels. The H79 did something like this, DVI would be video brightness and resync would send it to PC brighness levels. I remember I had a problem with black crush on video BL so I had to hit the resync button and tune the PC BL to avoid the black crush. They'll have to figure out what's making it switch.


This would explain this sort of behavior. Unfortunately PC's can be configured to generate both PC and video levels and I was definitely wanting a setting where I could specify it and know what was being used. It was very easy to set brightness and contrast with video levels on HDMI-1, but I had a tough time getting contrast set properly with HDMI-2 or DVI using an HTPC.


Interesting review, allot of work :)
thanks

Thanks. I was really interested in dynamic black so that's why I spent a lot of time measuring the Optoma. Given the problems with lamp flicker with test patterns and also the difficulty in getting the contrast setting accurate, I'd just describe these measurements as preliminary and not the final word. If I had to do it all over again I would also calibrate brightness to 255 and then add another test pattern for 109% whites, this helps to ensure that the full brightness range is being measured and would help to point out an incorrect brightness setting.

Great review Mark!

I also like the idea of the 2.0:1 screen.

Mark,

Thanks for the superb review.

Thanks for shedding some light on the workings of DB.

It's interesting how they're able get the greater brights along with darker blacks in dark scenes, given that the difference in lamp output between high and low lamp settings for pj's in general seems to be at most 25%.

Perhaps more (but many times more?) is possible on a short term basis.

I also wonder what effect it has on lamp life.

On the Superwide, I was surprised looking at Optoma's picture at how little seemed to be lost on 2.35.

Turns out the picture is not accurate; I used calipers to measure and they show a 7% total loss in picture width where in fact it's 15% (2/2.35 = .85).

Regarding brightness, would you say that the 8200 is on par with the RS1?

Not sure if you're at liberty to say, but were the 8200's returned to AVS because of the unusable Cinema2 DB setting, or for other types of issues which you didn't have?

Thanks for the great review Mark. Interesting results.
If I hadn't known better I would have assumed that it was delivering at least 15k:1 or thereabouts, but with Cinema1 it only measured in at about 6.5k:1. I think the high ANSI contrast helps in this perception of blacks in that it allows the blacks to be as good as they can be in the presence of surrounding luminance.That is probably part of it, but it also looks like they have higher intra-image CR in some of your tests than 6.5k would normally indicate. One of the main advantages of 15k:1 on/off CR over say 2.8k:1 on/off CR is up to around 5x or so higher intra-image CR in some scenes. 6.5k vs 2.8k would normally be like the 2.3x:1 range, but you got more than that in some cases.
One of the key features of the Optoma is it's use of dynamic black to enhance contrast and improve blacks. According to Optoma, dynamic black makes no use of dynamic gamma which is common in Sony and other dynamic iris equipped projectors.It sounds to me like that person from Optoma who told you that may not understand how the whole system works (including TI's part) or was referring to what happens after gamma is adjusted dynamically to account for the iris shutting down. Otherwise, how did you get the crushing from 80%stim to 100%stim on that one test pattern? Modulating the lamp shouldn't have done that.
Instead it boosts brightness by increasing and modulating the lamp intensity while simultaneously decreasing the iris aperture. In principle this sounds intriguing because it implies boosting something akin to native contrast.It looks to me like their native or static on/off CR goes up significantly as the iris is closed. If that is the case then they could have also provided a higher native on/off CR with less lumens for white case with no DB, like some other DLPs.

It would be interesting to see how this implementation compares to Planar's.

--Darin

Not sure if you're at liberty to say, but were the 8200's returned to AVS because of the unusable Cinema2 DB setting, or for other types of issues which you didn't have?


Jason doesn't say specifically what the issues were, but he does state specifically that AVS no longer sells them.



here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15927820#post15927820) and here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15929729#post15929729)

Excellent review Mark! Hopefully Optoma can do some firmware upgrades to iron out the rough spots as this machine looked great at CES.

Mark, when PureMotion is turned off, will the 8200 display a 1080p24 input signal using 5:5 Pulldown, or does it automatically add 3:2 Pulldown and judder?

Nice review Mark

I have been interested in the Optima 8200 for sometime and as you know I really liked the RS20

If they had implemented this projector with a .95 chip it would have been a lot sharper because going to a .65 chip increases the Nyquist cutoff frequency by 1.5 times. This really makes the lens design much harder and will compromise the sharpness

The variable lamp control will improve the color on the UHP projectors if their is a good cms system because you can use it to pick up the red portion of the spectrum and it can be used to decrease dither artifacts.



that 735 ANSI contrast is close to the dlp dark chip 4

As much as I like LCOS projectors ,the next generation is going to have to do something to increase the pixel contrast either by adding a 4 th panel or changing the chip

If power is not a huge consideration I think the next generation of projectors which will produce the best images will have the following specifications

1. A dark chip 4 DLP .95 single chip

2. RGB led light source with 256 levels of intensity

Guys you're bringing up some great points and interesting questions. Unfortunately I'm rushing to get on a flight for a trip and won't be back until Thursday but I'll respond to everything then. Thanks again for the great questions though.

"With DB enabled in Cinema1 mode, The whites from 80-100% were completely crushed and were not discernible from each other. As shown below:"

Most likely brilliant color is the culprit for the white crush. They must have added a level of brillaint color when using Cin1, probably a lesser amount of BC when using Cin2.

Was there anything in the menu's to disable brilliant color?

Wing gave me some info, you should tune the whites and blacks with DB on to avoid the crushing if you're going to use DB. The machine just uses brilliant color for video choices other than Cinema which uses none. The bright choice will use the most brilliant color, video/TV use a very small amount.

He says you can definetly use DB and not have crushed B/W by using the gamma choices, or just bright/contrast and with the DB on.

Most likely brilliant color is the culprit for the white crush.I'm not sure how brilliant color would crush whites when there is mostly black and not in bright scenes (which it sounds like wasn't an issue). That sounds more like a DI thing to me. I don't recall crushing at the high end being a complaint with brilliant color before (like before DIs).
Wing gave me some info, you should tune the whites and blacks with DB on to avoid the crushing if you're going to use DB.Will that reduce the native on/off CR significantly? If the Contrast setting was turned down enough so that stuff in that test pattern from 80%stim to 100%stim wasn't crushed it could take the native on/off CR down from about 2800:1 to about 1700:1 and probably take the dynamic on/off CR down quite a bit too. Depends on how they implemented things, but that is about what I would expect.

It doesn't sound like this thing has a manual iris that users can move (unless there is something in the service menu), but at some point I would expect that turning the Contrast down to keep from ever having any high end crushing with a DI system wouldn't be worth it compared to just having the iris at a fixed spot or getting the extra dynamic contrast in exchange for some crushing on some fairly extreme images.

--Darin

Yes it's not brilliant color because Cinema video choice has none and it's probably what Mark or anybody would choose when starting out.

If Mark tuned the white level with DB on, then he would hv tuned the Black level with DB on. That could raise the on and off, or it may just be about the same as what he got. If the Iris movement stretches black further from white with DB on, which could be the case we would end up with a higher CR.

Good news for me I should get my machine in a couple days.

Guitarman - Sounds like you are in contact with Wing.... has there been any indication about firmware/fixes/QA/QC issues?

He seemed fast to respond about crushing blacks/whites, but have not seen any word /posts from him since before the "problem" posts started.

I hope to not sound antagonistic, quite the opposite, I am REALLY interested in this PJ, but the stories are so hit or miss right now. Would like to hear some word of encouragement from Optoma.

Watched Speed Racer tonight and did not see the Iris once and it was in Cinema 2.
Put "The Lion King" back in and on Cinema 2 it was very detectable but switched to cinema 1 and could not see it at all in the same scene.

I know this shouldn't have anything to do with it, but I have not seen one sign of the iris when watching any blu-ray movie.
I've seen it a couple time on standard DVD on Cinema 2 but never on Cinema 1.

I know I'm very happy with the picture on this unit.

Scott

"has there been any indication about firmware/fixes/QA/QC issues?"

I don't think they'll be any firmwares. I just want to get the machine and take a look for myself.

edit:
There you go you see Scotty has had it a while (likes it), CLRV likes his, Mark seems to like the one he had. The guys that got sick, well maybe the force wasn't with them on this one.

Fantastic review!

I hope to not sound antagonistic, quite the opposite, I am REALLY interested in this PJ, but the stories are so hit or miss right now. Would like to hear some word of encouragement from Optoma.

IMHO From a damage control perspective it would be inappropriate for Optoma to respond to any of the cited issues unless they had documented the issue and developed a solution they intended to roll out. To comment without a solution would be to acknowledge an unresolved flaw and would be certain to have an even more negative impact on sales.

If they can resolve some of the issues than we will hear about it.

Just another factoid. If you Google "Optoma 8200 review" guess what is the first link suggested? The power of AVS

Mark, you're the new king of reviews. BTW, I hope nobody "quotes" that post. :D

"has there been any indication about firmware/fixes/QA/QC issues?"

I don't think they'll be any firmwares. I just want to get the machine and take a look for myself.

edit:
There you go you see Scotty has had it a while (likes it), CLRV likes his, Mark seems to like the one he had. The guys that got sick, well maybe the force wasn't with them on this one.

So if there are no issues to be fixed by firmware, then there were a few (3 to 4) hardware problems. I understand from clrv that the DI can be tweaked via service menu so may be some people gave up too early because they didn't the DI?

Anyway the success rate doesn't impress me so far. I don't have the force with me. I want the manufacturer to iron out the issues (including QC) before I gave them my hard earned money. Hope the next batch or two works out better. Shall we wait for HD8200a? :)

A $10,000 review for a 5k projector...nice
It that's not the best review in AVS history I don't know what is..(sorry Jason).


But the question is do I buy it?:D

No worries...I gave up on them a long time ago anyways. Too much work! :)

Mark, do you have post-calibration RGB and/or dE data for the grayscale?

Also, do you have post-calibration data for gamut and color decoding after you lowered the Color control 5 ticks?

Finally, the white crush you saw in Cinema 1 and (to a lesser degree) in Cinema 2 sounds a lot like what Greg Rogers used to talk about with respect to the DI in Sony projectors. He called it "brightness compression." Since the Optoma uses a different technique for its DI than Sony, I'm wondering if you think this is essentially the same artifact?

No worries...I gave up on them a long time ago anyways. Too much work!

I am sure it's nice to know that Mark is taking the ball and running with it. You guys seem to have a great team over at AVS..might have to change the name to Audio Video Superheros:D

Can you advise your screen type and fabric used in your review please. thx

Great review. The one place that we differ on is the lumens. When I get to work I will post my calibration results but my lumens reading was allot higher. Your meter is better than mine though as I am using a i1Pro.

I am using a Stewart Studiotek 130G3. Projector is 15ft back and Ceiling Mounted. Disregard below 30 as the i1Pro does not read correctly under 30.

Mode - User
Contrast - 41
Brightness - 41
Color - 57
Tint - 47
Sharpness - 2
Noise Reduction - 0
Gamma - Standard *Curve type 4, offset -1*
Color Temp - Warm
Red Gain 5
Green Gain -3
Blue Gain -5

Red Bias 0
Green Bias 1
Blue Bias -1

Pure color Off
Pure Detail Off

http://clrv.smugmug.com/photos/485596145_G6qq9-XL.jpg

http://clrv.smugmug.com/photos/485596134_PBKgM-XL.jpg

Mark,

Thanks for a great review. Your observations match my brief demo of the 8200. I believe my HD81-LV to be a bit sharper edge to edge and brighter. It has a manual iris that I run pretty closed down(11) for my 100" wide Stewart Studiotek 2:35 screen.

It was great to read your comparison to the RS20. I have never found LCOS or LCD or SXRD as seductive as DLP, no matter the black and CR advantage.

I look forward to your comparing other DLP models, such as Planar 8150, InFocus IN83 and BenQ W20000 in the future. My concerns about Optoma QC and reliability make me hesitant in going that route again.

It's interesting how they're able get the greater brights along with darker blacks in dark scenes, given that the difference in lamp output between high and low lamp settings for pj's in general seems to be at most 25%.

Perhaps more (but many times more?) is possible on a short term basis.

I also wonder what effect it has on lamp life.


Yes, it's quite an achievement to deliver more brightness at 100 IRE while also reducing black levels by about 1/2. It does seem like it would drive the lamp very hard. I'd love to know more about this technology, if anyone has any links to white papers that discusses it in more detail, please let me know.


On the Superwide, I was surprised looking at Optoma's picture at how little seemed to be lost on 2.35.

Turns out the picture is not accurate; I used calipers to measure and they show a 7% total loss in picture width where in fact it's 15% (2/2.35 = .85).

Regarding brightness, would you say that the 8200 is on par with the RS1?


Yes you're right. My original source for the Superwide numbers was TzungILin's post here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15783316#post15783316). After rereading it I can see that he said 7% on each side or ~14% total. Thanks for catching that and I'll update my post to reflect the change.

That is probably part of it, but it also looks like they have higher intra-image CR in some of your tests than 6.5k would normally indicate. One of the main advantages of 15k:1 on/off CR over say 2.8k:1 on/off CR is up to around 5x or so higher intra-image CR in some scenes. 6.5k vs 2.8k would normally be like the 2.3x:1 range, but you got more than that in some cases.


Very good point. The intra-image contrast test shows much more contrast potential than is implied by the the on/off measurements alone. It does seem to have the potential to deliver the equivalent of 20k:1 although it's a mystery why the on/off measured relatively low.


It sounds to me like that person from Optoma who told you that may not understand how the whole system works (including TI's part) or was referring to what happens after gamma is adjusted dynamically to account for the iris shutting down. Otherwise, how did you get the crushing from 80%stim to 100%stim on that one test pattern? Modulating the lamp shouldn't have done that.

It looks to me like their native or static on/off CR goes up significantly as the iris is closed. If that is the case then they could have also provided a higher native on/off CR with less lumens for white case with no DB, like some other DLPs.


This is another good point. When I first looked at the low APL greyscale test pattern, I assumed that I was seeing brightness compression very similar to what happens with dynamic gamma with a Sony DI implementation. But with dynamic gamma, it's the inability to boost luminance in the upper ranges that causes BC. If for example, the iris aperture reduces light output by 1/2, dynamic gamma can only make up for the light loss up until about 70 IRE or so (depending on gamma the 50% luminance point is around 60-70 IRE). Without an ability to raise the light output, dynamic gamma quickly runs out of headroom and the whites get crushed.

We can see from the relative white point graph that DB doesn't have this problem however. At 100 IRE, it's delivering 15% higher brightness at about 1/2 of the black level as the DB=off setting. Pretty impressive. So it seems like the technology is capable of a good greyscale without brightness compression. It could be that the technology just needs to be refined a bit more.

It'll be interesting to see where this technology is headed, especially given the interest in LED illumination systems which switch rapidly but tend to be dim. I can see where a manufacturer may be forced in the future to make a decision to tradeoff more rainbow artifacts for more intra-image contrast and vice versa.

It definitely makes for some interesting times in the DLP camp, which has been pretty quiet technology-wise the past few years.

Mark, when PureMotion is turned off, will the 8200 display a 1080p24 input signal using 5:5 Pulldown, or does it automatically add 3:2 Pulldown and judder?

Due to lack of time I didn't spend a lot of time examining the video processing section and instead chose to focus most of my efforts on dynamic black. I would be surprised if they didn't use an even multiple of 24hz though. It's getting pretty rare for new designs to reinterlace and use 3:2 pulldown at 60hz. I wish I still had a unit to check this out though.


clrv Great review. The one place that we differ on is the lumens. When I get to work I will post my calibration results but my lumens reading was allot higher. Your meter is better than mine though as I am using a i1Pro.


Throw plays a big role in lumens too and these were all measured at close to longest throw where there is usually less lumens.

Can you advise your screen type and fabric used in your review please. thx


Stewart Studiotek 130. 110" 16x9. Completely light controlled room with black ceiling and black side walls transitioning to dark burgundy walls.


No worries...I gave up on them a long time ago anyways. Too much work!


Yeah the new guys always get stuck with all the crappy work :D (Just kidding of course) It was interesting to dig into dynamic black a little although it was a lot more work than I had expected.


Mark, do you have post-calibration RGB and/or dE data for the grayscale?

Also, do you have post-calibration data for gamut and color decoding after you lowered the Color control 5 ticks?


I can dig that all up. I could have spent more time fine tuning the greyscale and getting it overall a little better, but there were some spikes that can't be addressed by gain and offset adjustments alone. An 11-step greysale adjustment like the new JVC's have would be nice. I will say though that the greyscale looked fantastic as far as a complete lack of banding or other artifacts.


Finally, the white crush you saw in Cinema 1 and (to a lesser degree) in Cinema 2 sounds a lot like what Greg Rogers used to talk about with respect to the DI in Sony projectors. He called it "brightness compression." Since the Optoma uses a different technique for its DI than Sony, I'm wondering if you think this is essentially the same artifact?


Darin brought this up also and I talked about it a few posts back. I don't think it's the same artifact as BC, although visually they look similar. The term brightness compression, perfectly describes what is going on with a Sony DI because there is a brightness rolloff along the greyscale that is the inverse of the gamma curve shape that is needed to maintain brightness definition. So the whites do get compressed into each other with the Sony implementation.

From the luminance curve on the 8200 however, we can see that the 8200 doesn't rolloff in brightness like the Sony does. It's not a proper gamma shaped curve, but it is relatively linear which still should provide some delineation in the greyscale. Instead, it looks like whites are being crushed for some reason, so it's probably best to use a different term for it and white crush seems to fit.

Wing said you should tune blacks and whites with DB on to avoid the crushing.

"With DB enabled in Cinema1 mode, The whites from 80-100% were completely crushed and were not discernible from each other. As shown below:"

Most likely brilliant color is the culprit for the white crush. They must have added a level of brillaint color when using Cin1, probably a lesser amount of BC when using Cin2.

Was there anything in the menu's to disable brilliant color?


I don't recall seeing any settings for brilliant color. There is a "PureColor" feature which I disabled. In fact for the contrast meaasurements I disabled everything that I could disable except for those things that I was directly measuring.

Wing gave me some info, you should tune the whites and blacks with DB on to avoid the crushing if you're going to use DB. The machine just uses brilliant color for video choices other than Cinema which uses none. The bright choice will use the most brilliant color, video/TV use a very small amount.

He says you can definetly use DB and not have crushed B/W by using the gamma choices, or just bright/contrast and with the DB on.

This is good to know and it confirms what I posted about DB having the luminance headroom so that it can avoid brightness compression.

As far as tuning the whites go, as I'm sure you know, the norm for setting the contrast adjustment is to use very bright test patterns. With any typical contrast test pattern, dynamic black won't be engaged even if the user has selected the mode because the image is very bright. So I think the contrast adjustment setting will end up about the same independent of the mode chosen. Once the image gets dark and DB is engaged, there is a huge difference in whites with the different modes though.

Since most people never tune whites with a low APL greyscale test pattern, it would be asking a lot for people to tune using an overall very dark pattern. Even if they did, I think once the scene returned back to a bright scene, I don't think that the contrast setting will be correct. So what's really needed is for the user to be able to calibrate the contrast setting with a bright test pattern (DB disengaged) and then have it scale uniformly in dark scenes for the appropriate DB mode.

Wing said you should tune blacks and whites with DB on to avoid the crushing.

I was just writing a reply as you posted :)

"I can see that he said 7% on each side or ~14% total. Thanks for catching that and I'll update my post to reflect the change."

That's good, but Optoma is still on the hook for their misleading picture.

Yes, it's quite an achievement to deliver more brightness at 100 IRE while also reducing black levels by about 1/2. It does seem like it would drive the lamp very hard. I'd love to know more about this technology, if anyone has any links to white papers that discusses it in more detail, please let me know.



Yes you're right. My original source for the Superwide numbers was TzungILin's post here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15783316#post15783316). After rereading it I can see that he said 7% on each side or ~14% total. Thanks for catching that and I'll update my post to reflect the change.

so is it 5% and 7% per side?

For a total of 10% of the Vertical and 14% of the Horizontal?

I was just writing a reply as you posted :)


He told me crushed blacks or whites is a pet peave of his and the PJ wouldn't be designed with the problem. Also mentioned you could try different Cinema user choice - gamma's, I think there's five of them. But in the end simple contrast and brightness adjust ments should do the trick. Like when you engaged DB and saw the crushing in the high end you should just lower the contrast till the detail comes back.

When I first looked at the low APL greyscale test pattern, I assumed that I was seeing brightness compression very similar to what happens with dynamic gamma with a Sony DI implementation.I think you probably were, except that Optoma adds lamp modulation on top of it. Put another way, looks like the Optoma uses dynamic gamma to me (like the Planar does) and the suggestion to lower the Contrast setting would probably lower the native on/off CR, much like people could lower the Contrast setting on the Sony's to get rid of brightness compression, but at the expense of native/static and dynamic on/off CRs.
But with dynamic gamma, it's the inability to boost luminance in the upper ranges that causes BC.While the Optoma looks like it could use the lamp to avoid brightness compression, it still looks like it was doing dynamic gamma in your case. Maybe the TI part is doing the dynamic gamma and the Optoma part is doing the bulb, causing the compression. Either way I think your measurements show that gamma was changed dynamically, any way you look at it.
We can see from the relative white point graph that DB doesn't have this problem however.In this case it looks like the Optoma projector could have used the lamp to get more peak lumens for the same CR without using dynamic gamma, but TI's part may include dynamic gamma and need something to be done to avoid having it do that (like telling it different iris positions than you actually have because the lamp is compensating).
At 100 IRE, it's delivering 15% higher brightness at about 1/2 of the black level as the DB=off setting. Pretty impressive.I agree that it is impressive, but looks like another case of a DLP manufacturer using DB to deliver more lumens, instead of to deliver more CR. What I mean is it looks like they could have given just as much CR natively, but with lower lumens. That is useful for people looking for high lumens and still caring about CR, but for those who were fine with less lumens (like those using a high gain screen) it doesn't necessarily give them more on/off CR that they could have achieved just by leaving 2 irises closed down (like the Marantz 11S2 and Sharp 20k). And without the DB artifacts.
So it seems like the technology is capable of a good greyscale without brightness compression.If it is used for higher lumens when you have high CR and they start at a low static on/off CR iris position and end at a much higher static on/off CR iris position. If it was used for even higher CR at lower lumens that generally come with fairly closed down irises then I'm not sure it would still have the above advantage. It looks to me like they are using the fact that static on/off CR can go up significantly when going from a very open iris to closed down with DLP and that isn't likely to apply as much if they started with the irises closed down a fair amount for higher native or static on/off CR.

Just for the sake of trying to figure out how they achieve this, let's go with your 2000:1 without the DB on. If the lamp is turned down low (I'll say 60% of max for this example, although I'm not sure they could go that low) and they could shut 1 or 2 irises down in a way that would lower lumens by 30% and increase static on/off CR by 2.3x (to 4600:1) then they could have 1/2 the black level and 15% higher white level in a dark image with a little bit of white and the lamp at max with the iris(es) shut down.

In the above case what they largely would have achieved is higher lumens at around 5k:1 on/off as opposed to higher on/off CR.

Sorry if I missed it, but did you notice any difference in how loud the projector was between low lamp and high lamp? Is so, then how about between DB on with the lamp on low and DB off with the same? If they are pushing the lamp up to and maybe even beyond what it does for high lamp then some extra cooling might be necessary, especially for very dark movies where the iris might remain shut down a lot.

It would be interesting to see graphs like yours for the Lumis and see if they did things similarly.

--Darin

"the suggestion to lower the Contrast setting would probably lower the native on/off CR"

Darin no that's off because if they tune whites with DB on then blacks should be tuned with db on lowering the black level and keeping the CR intact.

I get the projector tomorrow can't wait to see what's going on.

I'll ask if when DB is set to off if the Iris is in wide open mode, maybe it's closed down a little for more CR.

Darin no that's off because if they tune whites with DB on then blacks should be tuned with db on lowering the black level and keeping the CR intact.No, that is not the way it would work unless Optoma messed things up. If you set the Brightness so that the mirrors are just off for video 16 with the DB off they should still be just off when DB is enabled.

Put a different way, Optoma and TI's job with the DB was to lower the blacks appropriately as the iris is closed down. That is how a proper DI works. A user in a dark room shouldn't need to set the Brightness with the DI enabled. Your statement above seems to have an assumption that they aren't doing the right thing for video black.

You can try setting the Brightness with the DB enabled and set it with the DB disabled and see if you come up with different values for this Brightness setting. If they are different by more than one click then Optoma should probably fix their implementation.

--Darin

Mark the light pulsing is the same item Alan started a thread on a while back.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=857743&highlight=

Both should be tuned with DB on which is the first thing I'll do tomorrow to keep the CR at it's best. You wouldn't tune blacks with DB off and whites with DB on, that would lower the CR. We don't want to leave the machine crushing whites for sure.

so is it 5% and 7% per side?

For a total of 10% of the Vertical and 14% of the Horizontal?

Yes, I believe that's right. The native 1920x1080 is masked top and bottom to 1920x960 to get to the 2.0:1 aspect ratio. So with 16x9 content it uses 1920x960 so that works out to about 11% total image being lost at the top and bottom.

For 2.35:1 content, it stretches the image vertically to the same 960 pixels to fill the 2.0:1 screen. So this would yield 2256x960 so then it crops the sides to 1920x960 to completely fill the 2.0:1 screen. So a little over 7% per side is lost.

This is a pretty slick feature that requires no adjustable masking, no anamorphic lenses and the only downsides are 1) scaling artifacts in the 2.35:1 vertical stretch and 2) cropping of the image. But as TzungiLin posted, there isn't a lot of area lost to cropping and directors try to maintan a safe zone for such things.

What a superb in depth review Mark! Aside from being so technically thorough, the review benefits from your being so in tune with what we AVS readers want to know about a display.

Thanks,

Rich

He told me crushed blacks or whites is a pet peave of his and the PJ wouldn't be designed with the problem. Also mentioned you could try different Cinema user choice - gamma's, I think there's five of them. But in the end simple contrast and brightness adjust ments should do the trick. Like when you engaged DB and saw the crushing in the high end you should just lower the contrast till the detail comes back.

It's good to know that readjusting contrast can bring it out of white crush, but as you and Darin alluded to, in a well behaved system the brightness and contrast settings should always apply as global settings. So whatever is chosen for gamma curves, or DB modes should still work properly with the previously selected brightness and contrast settings.

IIRC though, I believe that I cycled the DB modes when I was adjusting the contrast and it didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference. Once DB is engaged in a dark scene though there is a huge difference between modes as far as what happens to whites at least with that test pattern. Incidentally, with real video content I really didn't notice any crush. But it is hard to spot BC or crush, unless a person is very familiar with certain source content and knows what to look for (or is doing a side by side comparison).

While the Optoma looks like it could use the lamp to avoid brightness compression, it still looks like it was doing dynamic gamma in your case. Maybe the TI part is doing the dynamic gamma and the Optoma part is doing the bulb, causing the compression. Either way I think your measurements show that gamma was changed dynamically, any way you look at it.


I agree that the light coming out of the lens is modulated in a dynamic way due the combined effects of the lamp and iris which inherently changes the shape of the gamma curve. But I'm not seeing how the data shows that dynamic gamma is being applied in the Sony sense of the technology. In other words, I'd expect a luminance curve that instead of being shaped like a proper power curve is instead shaped more like a log(x) function.

I do understand your point about reserving a lot of lamp headroom to ensure that the system doesn't run out of brightness as the iris aperture is reduced, but if it had enough headroom available to fully make up for the loss of light from the iris at 100 IRE (which it apparently does from the luminance data), then I don't think that there would be a need to use dynamic gamma.

Am I missing something?


In this case it looks like the Optoma projector could have used the lamp to get more peak lumens for the same CR without using dynamic gamma, but TI's part may include dynamic gamma and need something to be done to avoid having it do that (like telling it different iris positions than you actually have because the lamp is compensating).

I agree that it is impressive, but looks like another case of a DLP manufacturer using DB to deliver more lumens, instead of to deliver more CR. What I mean is it looks like they could have given just as much CR natively, but with lower lumens. That is useful for people looking for high lumens and still caring about CR, but for those who were fine with less lumens (like those using a high gain screen)


That would be a nice tradeoff. Maybe in the future the technology will get refined enough where a person can use the lamp technology in a way that favors their own setup and tastes. It's an interesting technology that seems like it could be used in many places in front projection, but I'm not sure where it's headed with LED illumination on the horizon.


Sorry if I missed it, but did you notice any difference in how loud the projector was between low lamp and high lamp? Is so, then how about between DB on with the lamp on low and DB off with the same? If they are pushing the lamp up to and maybe even beyond what it does for high lamp then some extra cooling might be necessary, especially for very dark movies where the iris might remain shut down a lot.


It's a couple of dB louder in high lamp than low lamp. IIRC, I do remember it getting louder at times with DB enabled. It's so quiet though it's easy to ignore :)


It would be interesting to see graphs like yours for the Lumis and see if they did things similarly.


Yes I'd love to dig into the Lumis implementation and see how it compares. I think Alan mentioned that he measured 20k:1 on/off so there is a big difference right there.

Mark the light pulsing is the same item Alan started a thread on a while back.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=857743&highlight=

Thanks for digging up the reference. I'm surprised I missed it when it was first posted.


What a superb in depth review Mark! Aside from being so technically thorough, the review benefits from your being so in tune with what we AVS readers want to know about a display.

Thanks,

Rich


Thanks Rich, Tryg, Craig and everyone else who have posted such nice comments. As you can tell I really enjoy this hobby and it's always a pleasure discussing it with everyone and exchanging ideas and viewpoints. AVS is pretty unique in this respect.

Both should be tuned with DB on which is the first thing I'll do tomorrow to keep the CR at it's best. You wouldn't tune blacks with DB off and whites with DB on, that would lower the CR.It seems like you are sticking with your previous claim that adjusting the Brightness while DB is on will give you a different black level than adjusting the Brightness with the DB off and then turning the DB on. I don't mean this to offend, but it doesn't seem like you understand what the Brightness does with a DLP projector. If you think I am wrong, please explain why you think you would end up with a different Brightness setting if you calibrated it with the DB off than with the DB on.
We don't want to leave the machine crushing whites for sure.I don't agree. Some people may feel that way, but then why even using the DB? That is a serious question. What benefit do you or Wing think the DB brings if there is never any crushing? And I wonder if it is Wing's position that this projector doesn't do any dynamic gamma.

A DB brings some positive, but there is some negative that comes along with it if you use it to its full or very large advantage. If you want to make a rule that there will be no crushing near white ever or no brightness compression near white then that is also going to be very limiting as far as how much benefit can be applied to the on/off CR or total CR range. Put another way, there are benefits that most would like from a DI that they won't get if there is never any compression or crushing, even with that extreme image that Mark used (almost all black with a small gray step area).

I would like to see some actual numbers, like what native and dynamic on/off CRs you get after setting the white levels so that there is never any crushing near white, even and extreme image that is almost all black with just a little bit of stuff near white. We could then compare those to what people would get if they just turned the DB stuff off and set the white point for that way.

From what I am reading my doubts about Optoma knowing what they are doing with respect to DIs are increasing. This is the same company that finished dead last in the DI rankings by the Cine4home guys with the HD80. The Planar projector hadn't been reviewed by them at that point, but when they did review it they liked the DI very much from what I recall. And I think Bob Williams is one of the most respected engineers around here. I hope he won't mind me saying that I know his recommendation is to set Contrast and Brightness with the DB off and then turn the DB on with the Planar. And he has spent a ton of time optimizing their DI. I am sure that he would disagree with claims that you want to set things up to avoid any white crushing under any circumstances. That would be very limiting. Making the DI work the best possible includes some tradeoff when getting more benefit.

BTW: Just to add one example with respect to wanting no white crushing, what do you (or Wing) think the projector should do if there is an extended fairly dark scene where there is all of a sudden a very small glint off of something that then goes away? Do you think the projector should make the whole image brighter when that glint is there to avoid any crushing, not give much CR for the extended fairly dark scene because there might be a small glint of bright stuff coming up, go ahead and give that dark scene high CR and then deal with the small glint by doing some crushing or compression to keep the rest of the image from showing a bad pumping effect, or something else? I'm thinking of a scene in Johnny English like that and I think there is one in Donnie Darko that is somewhat like that, although it doesn't start as dark. There is also one near the beginning of There Will Be Blood as Daniel Day-Lewis takes a swing at the wall and sparks fly, but they might be bright enough that pumping would be noticeable.

--Darin

I agree that the light coming out of the lens is modulated in a dynamic way due the combined effects of the lamp and iris which inherently changes the shape of the gamma curve. But I'm not seeing how the data shows that dynamic gamma is being applied in the Sony sense of the technology.How would they get crushing like you showed in that one image if there wasn't a component that was raising 80%stim up to be equal (or close to equal) to 100%stim? The lamp wouldn't do that and the iris wouldn't do that. They may use dynamic gamma much less than Sony and others, but I don't see what else would cause 80% and 100% to be at the same levels in that one fairly extreme image.
It's an interesting technology that seems like it could be used in many places in front projection, but I'm not sure where it's headed with LED illumination on the horizon.It will be interesting to see. One nice thing about using LEDs like a DI is that they could still have manual irises like the Marantz 11S2 and Sharp 20k so a person could choose to start with less lumens, but higher native on/off CR. And I would expect that it would be easy to know how much the images had been dimmed when the LEDs were reduced, where a system with something like one manual iris and one dynamic iris with a DLP could have problems with the projector not knowing how much the light had been reduced by the dynamic iris (although this likely depends on the particular design).
Yes I'd love to dig into the Lumis implementation and see how it compares. I think Alan mentioned that he measured 20k:1 on/off so there is a big difference right there.I wonder if they have a similar thing to what this Optoma does, where some of the intra-image CRs are higher than the measured dynamic on/off CR would normally indicate, even for a projector with as much native on/off CR as that.

I may have missed it, but did you measure full screen white with the DB enabled? I saw that you got around 15% more for a small amount of white on black with DB on than DB off, but was wondering if full screen white was that much brighter or even more than that.

--Darin

Mark,

I just noticed something that seems a little odd. I noticed that you said the on/off CR was about 2000:1 with the DB off. But your chart of intra-image CRs as gray is swept from 0 to 100%stim shows less than 1000:1. I had been thinking that you were using just a little bit of non-black in that image, so that with a high ANSI CR compared to native on/off CR projector like this you would get close to the native on/off CR for your measurements in that image when you used 100%stim. Do the images for that one contain just a little bit of non-black? Do you do your measurements for black near those non-black parts? I'm trying to understand how you got so much less intra-image CR than on/off CR there without DB on and then what that means for the almost 2k:1 intra-image CR you got with DB on.

--Darin

It's good to know that readjusting contrast can bring it out of white crush,

The problem, though, is that lowering the contrast to eliminate crush reduces picture quality on brighter scenes where DB had no crush in the first place. Its the achilles heel of these DI algorigthms IMO.

Incidentally, with real video content I really didn't notice any crush.

Any scene that has near peak bright areas but is overall dark so that the DI clamps down will show it I would imagine...at least thats how it worked on my W5000. On Wall-e you can spot it during the 'space flight' scene when the AXIOM first comes into view. The bright edge of the ship is totally crushed. Its also easy to spot in side by sides with the JVC PJs...you can spot it more frequently if you look for it.

Once you spot it, you can use those scenes as a reference and tweak the settings to see the difference.

How would they get crushing like you showed in that one image if there wasn't a component that was raising 80%stim up to be equal (or close to equal) to 100%stim? The lamp wouldn't do that and the iris wouldn't do that. They may use dynamic gamma much less than Sony and others, but I don't see what else would cause 80% and 100% to be at the same levels in that one fairly extreme image.


Yes I see your point now. I guess it comes down to whether there is another mechanism that can cause white crush other than using dynamic gamma. It does look like video levels have changed and if the video levels have changed then it implies something like dynamic gamma is being used. I think it's Tom and Wing's position though that the white crush is caused by the white (contrast) setting simply needing to be adjusted better for that specific DB mode. I don't know that I buy that argument because there is such a huge difference between what happens with higher IRE whites between those 3 modes. If I get access to another 8200 I'll take a look at this though, or Tom can verify it when he gets his unit. The low APL greyscale is in the AVS Contrast thread.

Incidentally, getting the contrast and brightness settings correct is critical for taking dynamic contrast measurements and it's something that I spend a lot of effort getting right and I check it with several different test patterns. It's absolutely essential not to elevate black levels for example by having to high of a brightness setting, but setting it to low can make it look like it's crushing black contrast at the 0-10% range. IIRC, I didn't think that the DB mode affected the contrast adjustment, but I could be wrong. In general though, I had a lot of difficulty getting the contrast setting dialed in correctly with a HTPC and why I wish that it had an explicit video level setting. There were also all of the other issues that I mentioned that can affect static test patterns like the lamp flickering and shutting down every minute or so and the lamp and iris sometimes working inconsistently with the same test pattern. All of these issues combined are reasons why I mentioned that I would consider this to be only preliminary data. I'd like to retake this data once the software issues were fixed.


It will be interesting to see. One nice thing about using LEDs like a DI is that they could still have manual irises like the Marantz 11S2 and Sharp 20k so a person could choose to start with less lumens, but higher native on/off CR. And I would expect that it would be easy to know how much the images had been dimmed when the LEDs were reduced, where a system with something like one manual iris and one dynamic iris with a DLP could have problems with the projector not knowing how much the light had been reduced by the dynamic iris (although this likely depends on the particular design).
I wonder if they have a similar thing to what this Optoma does, where some of the intra-image CRs are higher than the measured dynamic on/off CR would normally indicate, even for a projector with as much native on/off CR as that.


It would be interesting to know. This goes to show the value of supplementing on/off and ANSI with something that shows intra-image contrast when the contrast enhancement is engaged.


I may have missed it, but did you measure full screen white with the DB enabled? I saw that you got around 15% more for a small amount of white on black with DB on than DB off, but was wondering if full screen white was that much brighter or even more than that.


I didn't post the numbers, but I did take the data. The full white reading was essentially identical given the variability of the probe and I always take multiple readings and average the result. Here it is:

DB=OFF DB=C1 DB=C2
white 555 551 556
black .28 .09 .07
on/off 2003 6482 7831

"explain why you think you would end up with a different Brightness setting if you calibrated it with the DB off than with the DB on."

I'll probably have to raise the brightness with DB on. :)
I see what you're getting at the mirror dithering point will always be the same. DB looks to be a great way to get the blacks lower as long as there aren't any by products, plus you keep all the brightness and mid brightness the bulb has to offer.

Much better than locking down an Iris and lowering the projectors overall brightness. Specially when the lamp starts aging which is pretty fast. I measured the Sharp Z2000 which is considered very bright at 18ft-candles when new, 650hours later 7ft-candles. So DB if it looks right will give you the most out of your lamp, every bit of brightness it can offer from day one to half life and on.
Let me go see if I can find the UPS truck, can't wait.

Mark,

I just noticed something that seems a little odd. I noticed that you said the on/off CR was about 2000:1 with the DB off. But your chart of intra-image CRs as gray is swept from 0 to 100%stim shows less than 1000:1. I had been thinking that you were using just a little bit of non-black in that image, so that with a high ANSI CR compared to native on/off CR projector like this you would get close to the native on/off CR for your measurements in that image when you used 100%stim. Do the images for that one contain just a little bit of non-black? Do you do your measurements for black near those non-black parts? I'm trying to understand how you got so much less intra-image CR than on/off CR there without DB on and then what that means for the almost 2k:1 intra-image CR you got with DB on.

--Darin

This is a very good question. The test pattern uses perfect black (RGB=0) rather than video black everywhere except for 4 small rectangles that surround the probe area being measured. The four small rectangles contain the white stimulus that is ramped from 1% of video black to video white (235) and they are relatively close proximity-wise to the probe area being measured. They are close enough to where even a high ANSI contrast projector like the 8200 can have a measurably raised black level compared to full field black. In this particular case though the 8200 has such a high black level floor (DB=off) that it looks like it's capturing the floor throughout the range (this can be seen from the graph of the black readings). So it should end up yielding very close to the numbers that I measured for on/off.

Looking through the data I can see that the white reading is low throughout and it's not something that I'm surprised at. As I mentioned, sometimes I would see situations where the lamp brightness would be inconsistent even though nothing had changed. For example, I once measured ANSI contrast at 720:1 with a white reading of 1390 and black at 1.93, later the lamp output inexplicably changed so that the white reading dropped to 760 which gave a black reading of 1.37 and a contrast of 553. This was independent of any modes or adjustments being set and happened after the lamp had cycled (flickered and gone dark for a brief instant) due to the bug that I mentioned. I had reported this to Optoma and I think it's related to test pattern bug which they have confirmed. In fact, I've been calling it lamp flicker but what is really going on is the lamp steps down quickly in brightness and then goes black briefly before coming back up and I think something is going on with the ramp down where it doesn't come back up to full brightness.

Because of the lamp and iris inconsistencies I had to reduce my expectations a little as far as the data that I took and rather than comparing it to other projectors like I had done with the static low APL test patterns. Instead I focused on the dynamic data only and in particular only relative measurements between modes, that way if the lamp was reading low or there were other issues at least it was doing so consistently between modes. It was a disappointment though to not be able to add it in the mix of projectors measured in the contrast thread as far as static contrast vs luminance. The 8200 is an interesting combination of high ANSI and average on/off and it would be interesting to see where the crossover is at similar to what we had done with the Sharp 20K, RS1 and Sony VW50.

To ensure that the readings were reproducible, I took multiple readings at each point to ensure that it was repeatable and then also went back and repeated the entire suite of measurements a second time to ensure that the measurements were consistent and that the peaks and dips weren't due to something that had changed between readings. Both the white and black readings were consistent the second time around.

Given all of the issues though, I really wondered how much data to post and if it would be better to post just ANSI and on/off numbers, but I thought that the results showing the large amount of intra-image contrast benefits and also black reduction were worthwhile. All in all though I'd really like to repeat all of these results once Optoma fixes the lamp/test pattern bug.

The problem, though, is that lowering the contrast to eliminate crush reduces picture quality on brighter scenes where DB had no crush in the first place. Its the achilles heel of these DI algorigthms IMO.


That's my take on it too.


Any scene that has near peak bright areas but is overall dark so that the DI clamps down will show it I would imagine...at least thats how it worked on my W5000. On Wall-e you can spot it during the 'space flight' scene when the AXIOM first comes into view. The bright edge of the ship is totally crushed. Its also easy to spot in side by sides with the JVC PJs...you can spot it more frequently if you look for it.

Once you spot it, you can use those scenes as a reference and tweak the settings to see the difference.

Yes, I fully agree. If a person is familiar enough with the content they know what to look for and can spot it. With new content though it's really difficult to know. A side by side will also show it clearly.

Got it! ceiling mounted and I'm watching National Treasure 2 in Cin1. This must be a good one because so far DB has worked flawlessly. The image is very sharp with a heavy 3D effect, blacks are deep and colors are saturated heavy but look natural. What's not to like here. I took a quick look at cin2 and it looked good also, yes you might see a glimpse of the iris doing something but it's so fast like in a wink of an eye. I'll keep watching

http://www.cigarbest.com/sales/hd8200pj.jpg
http://www.cigarbest.com/sales/hd8200london.jpg

Clouds in the London shot don't look crushed, clouds from England probably never looked crushed.

Glad you are enjoying it. It really does through a great picture. Do you have the Dark Night? If you do can you check a few scenes. Thanks

Ft candles are 17 in bright and 13 in econo, that breaks down to 560lumens birght and 430 lumens econo on a 106" diagonal 1.0 gain screen. But actually I use a Dalight High Power screen so what I see is a brighter picture. I get the projector mounted down as much as possible to pick up the dalites screen gain. 560 and 430 are decent lumens a 1.0.

I should note also that I have the projector mounted far back 15', far from max zoom so you could add 20 25% when mounted at max zoom / closer to the screen. Which would make lumens more like 700 in bright and 535 in econo. That's on a 106" diag 1.0 screen.

Ok the Ti Dynamic Black, before I get too blasted (it's Friday night). Here's what I see with DB in use. Ti has a great system here it is extremely fast operating, it like flows with the video. I'm viewing Dark City on BLue Ray which is loaded with Ansi loving scenes, dark with bright lights. If you can spot a movement of luminance it's so fast and natural like when you blink your eye that I find it non obtrusive.

Spotting a glimpse of a luminance change at lightning speed isn't the end of the world. Sit back and enjoy a movie because when the scene is settled and very dark this DB creates a deep cavern of black that I haven't scene on any DP till today. The HD8200 is a great projector.
Cin 1 by the way. Cin 2 does get aggressive but with the right movie it could be exceptional. All in all just more things to play around with.
I'd love to buy this projector.

By the way you absolutely have to buy Dark City on Blue Ray, the video is more than excellent and the sound 7.1 HD DTS-Master matches the video quality.

OK maybe I just don't understand how this works but I am confused as to why my lumens reading is so much higher. Mark explained the difference with his but Tom our projectors are mounted the same. Mine is 15ft back but on a 110" screen (Stewart Studioteck G3).

Ft candles are 17 in bright and 13 in econo, that breaks down to 560lumens birght and 430 lumens econo on a 106" diagonal 1.0 gain screen. But actually I use a Dalight High Power screen so what I see is a brighter picture. I get the projector mounted down as much as possible to pick up the dalites screen gain. 560 and 430 are decent lumens a 1.0.

I should note also that I have the projector mounted far back 15', far from max zoom so you could add 20 25% when mounted at max zoom / closer to the screen. Which would make lumens more like 700 in bright and 535 in econo. That's on a 106" diag 1.0 screen.

It could be the device to read the light level. I use a dedicated light meter not the color sensor a calibrating system uses. Light meters reading light level are more accurate.

Tom,

In what ways do you feel this projector excells over the Optoma HD80?

Please be specific!!

Thanks Joey

It's looks 10 times better. Like when you saw your first Sony Trinitron, it was just scores above the rest of the TV's.

Got it! ceiling mounted and I'm watching National Treasure 2 in Cin1. This must be a good one because so far DB has worked flawlessly. The image is very sharp with a heavy 3D effect, blacks are deep and colors are saturated heavy but look natural. What's not to like here. I took a quick look at cin2 and it looked good also, yes you might see a glimpse of the iris doing something but it's so fast like in a wink of an eye. I'll keep watching

http://www.cigarbest.com/sales/hd8200pj.jpg
http://www.cigarbest.com/sales/hd8200london.jpg

Clouds in the London shot don't look crushed, clouds from England probably never looked crushed.

I have been awaiting more reviews of this machine. I anticipated a glowing review from Guitarman so I decided to see if I could view another HD8200 after my first viewing (a purchase from AVS that was quickly returned) did not work out so well.

I setup time with a local installer on Thursday through AVAD to view the machine in my home because of my concern with the dynamic iris. Again I could see (and the installer agreed) the iris working in both implementations (AI was turned off), but it not as bad as my first machine. Maybe it has something to do with the build dates? I dont know, but from what I have seen the iris on the 8200 is more noticeable than a blink of an eye. It usually lags behind the picture for 1 second and catches up when it doesnt seem to need to.

My recommendation is to purchase the unit and then see if you can notice the iris. I believe that most of us in this forum will be bothered by the iris, but again thats something only your eyes can tell you.

Otherwise I believe BenQ just announced there new DLP projector so that might be something to wait for as well.

Ti has a great system here it is extremely fast operating, it like flows with the video. I'm viewing Dark City on BLue Ray which is loaded with Ansi loving scenes, dark with bright lights. If you can spot a movement of luminance it's so fast and natural like when you blink your eye that I find it non obtrusive.

Spotting a glimpse of a luminance change at lightning speed isn't the end of the world.

Cin 1 by the way. Cin 2 does get aggressive but with the right movie it could be exceptional.

The luminance changes I saw in Cinema 1 were very slow, purposely, according to Wing. At the beginning of a scene I could see the iris slowly ramp up. The opposite of a blink of the eye or lightning speed. These were on difficult transitions with "Dark Knight". My hope is that with movies that aren't so demanding, Cinema 1 could be pretty unobtrusive. Cinema 2 is a non-starter, as is AI.

I must say that I might miss the lumens that my HD81-LV throws, but since I run with iris at 11, maybe the difference using DB on the 8200 wouldn't be that great. The 8200 I saw at Optoma on a 160" screen looked pretty bright to me and the blacks were fantastic with Cinema 1.

I did own the Sony HS60 and Pany AX100 and the HD8200 iris does just as good as those do. Better in that there's no BC. I think the problem could be like with rainbows now, some will just be over sensitive. I'm watching Dark City again right now, a movie that should send the PJ into a tail spin, nothing nothing at all.

I assume you all did but owners should tune the blacks and white with DB on. I did notice on the HD DVE contrast pattern the top end of the scale was blotted/crushed out. Tune that down and go back and forth checking the brightness level again. I think this will make movies more enjoyable and for the Iris sensitive you'll see less of what you're seeing. In the pattern you could see the big swing up to bleeching out the highs and that has to show up in video. So tune up

The pattern let me explain this better, it's the pattern oh about 12 steps up from the brightness pattern on HD-DVE. One of my complaints to Joe Kane, why not have them next to each other. The pattern has graysteps criss cross and after a while it inverts them. Anyway what I was seeing with the projector as you first look at the pattern is a live moving effect on the patterns top end grays as the Iris or pulsing takes effect. So it stands to reason if you make this effect less strong by lowering the contast till the gray boxes are stable that you'll see less of a problem in the video.

The luminance changes I saw in Cinema 1 were very slow, purposely, according to Wing. At the beginning of a scene I could see the iris slowly ramp up. The opposite of a blink of the eye or lightning speed. These were on difficult transitions with "Dark Knight". My hope is that with movies that aren't so demanding, Cinema 1 could be pretty unobtrusive. Cinema 2 is a non-starter, as is AI.

I must say that I might miss the lumens that my HD81-LV throws, but since I run with iris at 11, maybe the difference using DB on the 8200 wouldn't be that great. The 8200 I saw at Optoma on a 160" screen looked pretty bright to me and the blacks were fantastic with Cinema 1.

Wing said he wouldn't trade away the HD80LV for the 8200. Not that it's either is better but it's just not enough of an upgrade, a trade off.

"Otherwise I believe BenQ just announced there new DLP projector"

Any more info? Googling just got me ols product announcements.

Noah there is a thread here at AVS on the new BenQ 6000 it is in the >$3k forum.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1127322

I'm viewing Dark City on BLue Ray ...
Could you please go to about the 5:08 or 5:09 mark in the Director's version where the main character is going down the stairs with a light at the bottom that also shines off one or both walls, then change the Contrast setting until there is no visible clipping or crushing with the DB on versus off and report on what that Contrast setting would be versus calibrating the Contrast with the DB off. I'm wondering how much (if any) you need to lower the Contrast setting in order to avoid any clipping or crushing in a scene like that. It would also be interesting to know how much that Contrast setting would lower the lumens for a full white screen over setting Contrast with the DB off.

Thanks,
Darin

I assume you all did but owners should tune the blacks and white with DB on. I did notice on the HD DVE contrast pattern the top end of the scale was blotted/crushed out. Tune that down and go back and forth checking the brightness level again. I think this will make movies more enjoyable and for the Iris sensitive you'll see less of what you're seeing. In the pattern you could see the big swing up to bleeching out the highs and that has to show up in video. So tune up

The pattern let me explain this better, it's the pattern oh about 12 steps up from the brightness pattern on HD-DVE. One of my complaints to Joe Kane, why not have them next to each other. The pattern has graysteps criss cross and after a while it inverts them. Anyway what I was seeing with the projector as you first look at the pattern is a live moving effect on the patterns top end grays as the Iris or pulsing takes effect. So it stands to reason if you make this effect less strong by lowering the contast till the gray boxes are stable that you'll see less of a problem in the video.

Do you mind posting your contrast settings for DB=off, DB=cinema1 and DB=cinema2 using a typical bright pattern like the one in the AVS709 test disk? I think I mentioned this already, but because DB is engaged only in low APL scenes it shouldn't have an affect on the contrast setting with a typical bright contrast test pattern. It would be interesting to repeat the process using this pattern (http://public.csusm.edu/kai/mark/avs/20%20step%20greyscale%20-%20low%20APL.gif) and see what the difference is.


I'm watching Dark City again right now, a movie that should send the PJ into a tail spin, nothing nothing at all.


That's interesting as I could see the iris working in quite a few scenes in that movie. The interior of the car scene at the beginning of Ch. 14 was a good example. If you're not seeing anything there, then there may be some unit to unit variations based on the final calibration or something.

"Noah there is a thread here at AVS on the new BenQ 6000 it is in the >$3k forum."

Don't know how I missed that, thanks.

Could you please go to about the 5:08 or 5:09 mark in the Director's version where the main character is going down the stairs with a light at the bottom that also shines off one or both walls, then change the Contrast setting until there is no visible clipping or crushing with the DB on versus off and report on what that Contrast setting would be versus calibrating the Contrast with the DB off. I'm wondering how much (if any) you need to lower the Contrast setting in order to avoid any clipping or crushing in a scene like that. It would also be interesting to know how much that Contrast setting would lower the lumens for a full white screen over setting Contrast with the DB off.

Thanks,
Darin

Darin I didn't see any clipping in that scene at factory contrast setting or the tuned one. I did notice that any chance of seeing an Iris function is less or gone when tuning the contrast to the factory setting when using Cin2. Tuned I could see when the 3 guys are getting off the elevator the shading to black was stronger with contrast tuned. That could be natural because blacks are darker. Actually I prefer the image with the contrast way up at factory. What to do :)

"That's interesting as I could see the iris working in quite a few scenes in that movie. The interior of the car scene at the beginning of Ch. 14 was a good example. If you're not seeing anything there, then there may be some unit to unit variations based on the final calibration or something."

That scene had no effect in cin2 or cin1. I did notice the video does have flicker from the movie sets lighting DB on or DB off so maybe that's not a good scene to judge with.
__________________

Mark I just tuned the black and white with DB off then turned DB on and the whites don't crush with the Pattern, blacks stayed correct also.

Darin I didn't see any clipping in that scene at factory contrast setting or the tuned one. I did notice that any chance of seeing an Iris function is less or gone when tuning the contrast to the factory setting when using Cin2. Tuned I could see when the 3 guys are getting off the elevator the shading to black was stronger with contrast tuned. That could be natural because blacks are darker. Actually I prefer the image with the contrast way up at factory. What to do :)What is the factor Contrast setting and what is your tuned value? Have you measured the white level between the 2?

Thanks,
Darin

Tuned with the Iris off I got similar numbers as with on, contrast goes to 38 from 44 factory and brightness gets set to 44. I haven't used my colorfacts equipment yet but the grayscale look perfect in the gray test patterns. I did check the color patterns and they also were good.

That scene had no effect in cin2 or cin1. I did notice the video does have flicker from the movie sets lighting DB on or DB off so maybe that's not a good scene to judge with.
__________________

Actually it's the dynamic lighting in the movie combined with the many dark scenes that makes Dark City an acid test for irises. There are a lot of static scenes (scenes where the camera or actors don't move very much) but the lighting changes and either gets brighter or dimmer. Sometimes the brightness change is due to a light flicker or other times by a swinging light (like the one in the main menu). If the iris changes in those scenes it's much more noticeable than if it happens at the beginning of an abrupt scene change.

Ch. 14 has exactly that sort of a scene in it. There is a close up of an actors face, (I think it's Keiifer Sutherland). The actors face gets brighter as they pass a light source that is off camera (probably another car) and I could see the iris change in that scene with both C1 and C2.

I used the same scene to check out Shep's returned 8200 and with his it looked like the iris aperture wasn't changing but the lamp became brighter, so the image brightness seemed to slowly bloom. I think the issue with his is a bad iris though.

Tuned with the Iris off I got similar numbers as with on, contrast goes to 38 from 44 factory and brightness gets set to 44. I haven't used my colorfacts equipment yet but the grayscale look perfect in the gray test patterns. I did check the color patterns and they also were good.

Okay so just so I understand this correctly. You're saying that with typical test patterns used for adjusting brightness and contrast that you're not seeing a difference with any of the dynamic black modes correct? This sounds consistent with what I noticed also.

If this is true then do I take the earlier comments about tuning to a specific DB mode to mean adjusting it with a dark pattern when the DB mode is engaged? It this is all true then it sounds like what a person has to do to avoid white crush in dark scenes is to "tune"/adjust it for the specific dark scene source content that they are viewing which seems pretty impractical when watching a new movie. Not only that but once tuned the contrast setting will be wrong in bright scenes when DB is not engaged.

Mostly I find the iris stable, I did find a scene in The Game where Mike D is going to fire the old guy from the Thirteenth Floor movie. This scene has Mike in the dark and the old guy standing in front of a wall of lit up windows and it moves back and forth between him and Mike. You can see the light change at each moment.

The scene is chapter 6 34mins into the movie.

I'm guessing with this type of scene any iris would be visible, if not what could be a way to fix it. Seems there's a trade off of having an Iris act lightning fast or having it gradually making it changes. What do you think?

I'll ask Wing if theres a way to speed up or slow down the reaction time in the service menu.

This is very interesting I decided to watch that scene with the contrast put back to the factory 44 from where I have it tuned down to 38 and there are no noticable side effects in the scene at all now, strange.

Okay so just so I understand this correctly. You're saying that with typical test patterns used for adjusting brightness and contrast that you're not seeing a difference with any of the dynamic black modes correct? This sounds consistent with what I noticed also.

If this is true then do I take the earlier comments about tuning to a specific DB mode to mean adjusting it with a dark pattern when the DB mode is engaged? It this is all true then it sounds like what a person has to do to avoid white crush in dark scenes is to "tune"/adjust it for the specific dark scene source content that they are viewing which seems pretty impractical when watching a new movie. Not only that but once tuned the contrast setting will be wrong in bright scenes when DB is not engaged.

They should just tune with the DB off then pick what ever cinema Iris mode they like for a certain movie. That scene I mentioned in the post above you could see the windows with light were all crushed out with contrast at the factory number 44. But the iris changes weren't noticable.

Guitarman,

Could you also comment on the other features... frame interpolation, super wide, fan/color wheel noise, best vs. brightest modes. Thanks! I use my PJ for gaming much of the percentage of time, so the FI is factor over, say the JVC RS-10, and the ability to utilize the superwide, may allow me to put off CIH for a while.

Thanks!

I'm guessing with this type of scene any iris would be visible, if not what could be a way to fix it. Seems there's a trade off of having an Iris act lightning fast or having it gradually making it changes. What do you think?


I would guess that the best thing is to have it detect abrupt scene changes and then change the iris as quickly as posible at that time. With relatively static scenes the iris should stay pretty consistent throughout. I'm sure that there will always be slow scene change like a fade to black where this can't be done though. A frame look ahead will help the algorithm but then that means buffering frames and adding delay and gamers would complain. But the look ahead could be disabled though (kind of like how DVDO has a fast deinterlacing mode on the VP50).

"I would guess that the best thing is to have it detect abrupt scene changes and then change the iris as quickly as posible at that time."

Monday I'll see if we have control to speed it up in the servcie menu and see how that goes. Still haven't had darkness time to use colorfacts but OTB mine looks very good re the graysale for coloring. Looks like the coloring is better on this one vs the H79 H80/81 their last couple of high end projectors.

24fps is looking good and I left the Pure engine at what the factory likes, I just added a number on the detail.

I have a great scene to work on the Iris with. The matrix reloaded the scene where Neo talks to the oracle in the park. Here the Oracle's lighting is brighter than Neo's shot where the video is darker, not allot darker but enough to see when it goes to Neo the Iris pumps the light level darker. I'll ask if there's a way to adjust the Iris to ignore slight changes in scene darkness, which is the best way to handle these changes imo.

I'm on to something. I took a look at Heroes Scottyb asked me to. Now this show has mid tones that move in and out like crazy and I could see the Iris trying to stay with it and the pumping was very noticable. Just a small tweak in the service menu made it go away. In DA all it took was lowering the Full Step down by one number.

Yes, I went back to the Oracle scene and it still had a slight hang over but was improved 80%, one more number down on the Full step totally cleared it up. You guys can tweak your iris the same way, good luck.

Naah it was an illusion :) What happens is at times when you go to the service menu to change DA the Iris is disabled and when you go back to the main menu it's still disabled until you cycle the DB to off and then back to Cin1 or Cin2. So what I was seeing was video with DI off. The Matrix Reloaded Chaper 13 Oracle scene is a Iris torture test. Still most all other times and movies I find I don't notice the Iris.

Ok this hasn't been put out yet but since it's so usefull. Remember write down your original DA numbers for safe keeping. Don't make big changes.

Service access,
On the remote hit the power off button, left, left, up

Exit with return.

Still haven't had darkness time to use colorfacts but OTB mine looks very good re the graysale for coloring. Looks like the coloring is better on this one vs the H79 H80/81 their last couple of high end projectors.


If yours is like mine the color temp for the whole greyscale will be high. One thing I really liked about this unit though is the greyscale shows no banding or other artifacting. Perfectly smooth ramps.

Tom,
Link doesn't work.

I'm out of town and viewing this thread via phone so may have missed it.

I tried calibrating with DI on cin1 and can not get grayscale as good as when I cal. with DI off. Is it just me or is anyone else see the same thing

Because of the light level movement you can't grayscale tune with DI on. Turns out I could tune basic blacks and whites with DB off and not get white crush when putting DB back on.

Scotty my remote server co info got messed up, I'll re post the info later.
Tom

Tom,
Have you checked out any other movies since you did the iris adjustment in the service menu?
I'm gonna try it tonight.

Scott

I just threw in an edit a couple of posts back, seems the Iris gets disabled when you go to the service menu most times, at least on my machine it does. When back in the user menu I cycle the iris to off than back to cin1 and it starts functioning again. I have to talk to Wing about the 3 choices in DB to see what each one is doing.

It's the same on mine as well. I thought I had tried that setting :)

Guitarman,

Could you also comment on the other features... frame interpolation, super wide, fan/color wheel noise, best vs. brightest modes. Thanks! I use my PJ for gaming much of the percentage of time, so the FI is factor over, say the JVC RS-10, and the ability to utilize the superwide, may allow me to put off CIH for a while.

Thanks!

At 24fps I saw no judder, the fan and color wheel are whisper quiet. I don't even know if it's coming on when I first fire it up. The bright choice is only a couple of hundred extra lumens but it's far from D65k and looks washed out. Bright mode will get around 700 lumens that should be enough for sports or ambient light type viewing. Superwide does what it does without making the image soft.

The breakdown on what the items are in the DA menu.

Full Step effects the contrast, there isn't much room there from the factory setting. You can make blacks darker but they're at a low level already.

1/4 Step effects Cin1

1/10 Step effects Cin2

Spoke is an overall gamma item

Multiple Table should be left alone at factory 1.

So if I increse the # in the service menu does it make the iris faster or slower?

Scott

From what I saw lowering it makes it less but to me where the factory had it was the sweet spot.

Is the 8200 also coming by the alias 82?

Is the 8200 also coming by the alias 82?
Yes, that's its name over here in Europe. By the way, MSRP in Germany is 2999.- €.

Yes I think the factory setting is where to keep it. I have tried just about every combination I can think of. I don't think any setting really speeds up or slows the iris down just how much light it lets out.

Scotty, If you ended up reseting it like I had told you early go back in and on the 1/10 setting take it back to 85. For what ever reason reset takes that figure down to 84 but comes from the factory at 85.

I saw less of the iris on 84 but after looking at it with test patterns the overall brightness is brought up so you don't get as deep of blacks. Which is way I think I did not see the iris much in cin2.

Yes, that's its name over here in Europe. By the way, MSRP in Germany is 2999.- €.


Wow !

It's 2499€ in France ;-)

Mine is on the way...

Richard.

The distance calculator on the Opoma website doesn't seem to factor in the lenshift at all, only attributing the leeways to the use of zoom This is very frustrating, as lenshift is a real plus point feature that the calculator makes very difficult to gauge:

http://www.optomausa.com/distancecalculator.asp

Mark, how do you feel the HD8200 would compare to the Benq W20000 with the 0.95" DLP DarkChip3?

After living with the 8200 for awhile and comparing it head to head with an RS1 and RS20, it's my belief that it's the ANSI contrast that gives DLP the "pop" and "wow" factor that people use when discussing DLP. In dark scenes however, the situation was reversed and LCOS machines can (depending on the scene) have more depth and "Pop" due to their higher on/off contrast. Also not in every scene, but usually in dark scenes with small amounts of bright content. The end of the second Harry Potter movie is a good example of the sorts of scenes that look stunning on an RS20.

Objectivity makes for such an informative review, and for such a refreshing read. thanks for giving us such a worth-while look at how these machines perform.

-dave :)

Mark, how do you feel the HD8200 would compare to the Benq W20000 with the 0.95" DLP DarkChip3?

Excellent question. I had wanted to include a head-to-head comparison from a .95" DC4 (Marantz 11S2) but it didn't work out in time for this review. I think the DC4 will be a little sharper although I think the .65" chip resolves detail very well. If you're looking at the screen from 6" away and carefully examining individual pixels I think the pixels in the DC4 will be better defined. From a normal viewing distance, I think they would both be about equal. As far as 0.95" DC3 vs 0.65" DC3, I think that there are subtle differences as far as contrast goes. I believe TzungILin mentioned in the other 8200 thread that they saw some subtle differences between the chips.

"thanks for giving us such a worth-while look at how these machines perform."

I've got to ask - why the hyphen?

I've got to ask - why the hyphen?

That is funny-whether intensional or not.

That is funny-whether intensional or not.

Yes and no - I didn't realize it until after I wrote it.

Incorrect hyphenation is a pet peeve of mine; it's become rampant.

That is funny-whether intensional or not.

Yes and no - I didn't realize it until after I wrote it.

Incorrect hyphenation is a pet peeve of mine; it's become rampant.

Since we are getting all grammatical and all, I thought that I'd point out that "intension" and "intention" are different terms with very different meanings. "Worth-while" was certainly intensional, but it may or may not have been intentional.

"Intension" refers to a term's descriptive content or connotation. It is often used in contrast to the linguistic function of extension, denotation, or reference.

For example, "unicorn" has intension because we know what it means and what it describes. It has no extension, because no such thing, so far as we know, exists.

On the other hand, "intention" refers to someone's committing an act on purpose, rather than accidentally, which I gather was the meaning that was, well, intended.

Here endeth the lesson.

Since we are getting all grammatical and all, I thought that I'd point out that "intension" and "intention" are different terms with very different meanings. "Worth-while" was certainly intensional, but it may or may not have been intentional.

"Intension" refers to a term's descriptive content or connotation. It is often used in contrast to the linguistic function of extension, denotation, or reference.

For example, "unicorn" has intension because we know what it means and what it describes. It has no extension, because no such thing, so far as we know, exists.

On the other hand, "intention" refers to someone's committing an act on purpose, rather than accidentally, which I gather was the meaning that was, well, intended.

Here endeth the lesson.

Darn it, I even googled the word to see if I had it spelled correctly but never looked at the meaning. I did have good intentions though.

Scott

P.S. My motto is: "It's a shallow mind that can only think of one way to spell a word".

""intension" and "intention" are different terms with very different meanings."

I'll be darned, I didn't even know it was a word, thought it was a spelling error.

Dang......... I knew I should have stayed awake during English class...... but it was just way too early! :-)

So how about that Optoma... Does it have more overall intension of contrast than the Benq W20000?

Mark
How do you think the HD8200 compares with the SIM2 D80E? Thanks

Mark

I am very interested in HD sports. Your review seems to suggest you would recommend a high ansi machine for sports viewing. Does the RS20 with a high gamma setting look very similar to a high ansi machine as some others have suggested?

Edit: ANSI contrast

High ansi? Are you talking about brightness or contrast?

High ansi? Are you talking about brightness or contrast?

Ansi contrast.

Excellent question. I had wanted to include a head-to-head comparison from a .95" DC4 (Marantz 11S2) but it didn't work out in time for this review. I think the DC4 will be a little sharper although I think the .65" chip resolves detail very well. If you're looking at the screen from 6" away and carefully examining individual pixels I think the pixels in the DC4 will be better defined. From a normal viewing distance, I think they would both be about equal. As far as 0.95" DC3 vs 0.65" DC3, I think that there are subtle differences as far as contrast goes. I believe TzungILin mentioned in the other 8200 thread that they saw some subtle differences between the chips.


The Nyquist cutoff frequency on the .95 chip will be around 40lp/mm and the cutoff on the .65 chip is close to 60 so all things being equal the larger chip will have higher resolution. The smaller chip will have smaller pixels and less space between the pixels and for many spatial frequencies it may have a better net contrast

I would think they could drive the smaller pixels faster and that should reduce temporal dithering artifacts.

Mark did you notice less dithering artifacts on the screen relative to other DLP projectors you have observed. Did the image seem more stable than other DLP machines in darker scenes.

Mark

I am very interested in HD sports. Your review seems to suggest you would recommend a high ansi machine for sports viewing. Does the RS20 with a high gamma setting look very similar to a high ansi machine as some others have suggested?

Edit: ANSI contrast

I thought that the Optoma looked great with Sports. I do think that sports and similar bright content is very good source material for a high ANSI display that may not necessarily have great on/off. It doesn't have to be bright scenes though, the benefits of high ANSI can be seen in mixed and dark scenes too. The Optoma is particularly good with bright and some mixed scenes, while the RS20 is particularly good with dark and also some mixed scenes.

I've done a lot of viewing with the RS20 and a high gamma and I don't think that the gamma setting makes it look similar to a high ANSI display at all. I think gregr was the source of this comment and if I recall correctly it was in the context of recreating image pop rather than creating a similar look. The two displays do look different. LCOS has a beautiful smoothness to it while a high ANSI display has a vibrant dynamic look.

As I mentioned in the review I have started to notice a slight amount of haze in the blacks of the RS20. At least in some parts of some scenes that I attribute to the low ANSI compared to the Optoma. I've seen this in overall dark images as well. Even still though the blacks are so good on the RS20 that I prefer the image over the Optoma but I do miss the higher ANSI.

Also one thing about using a high gamma on the RS20, it can crush shadow detail and I think in some cases it may exacerbate the haze problem. With a lower gamma shadows come out of black faster and so any haze will be less perceptible when this happens. I've been using a gamma of 2.1 lately on the RS20 and I don't see the slight haze as often. I know of others who have used the gamma adjustment on the RS20 to mitigate some of the haze effects as well.

Mark
How do you think the HD8200 compares with the SIM2 D80E? Thanks

I haven't had a chance to compare them directly.


The Nyquist cutoff frequency on the .95 chip will be around 40lp/mm and the cutoff on the .65 chip is close to 60 so all things being equal the larger chip will have higher resolution. The smaller chip will have smaller pixels and less space between the pixels and for many spatial frequencies it may have a better net contrast

I would think they could drive the smaller pixels faster and that should reduce temporal dithering artifacts.

Mark did you notice less dithering artifacts on the screen relative to other DLP projectors you have observed. Did the image seem more stable than other DLP machines in darker scenes.


I'm not sure that it's always true that a smaller chip will always have less space between the pixels. Sometimes it may be advantageous to do a die shrink with the same process technology. In other words the minimum feature size may not change which may in turn mean that the gap between pixels doesn't change a lot even though large features like the pixel area is reduced.

There was a lot of discussion about this exact issue when the RS1 chips were first released. The chip geometries published by JVC indicated that the chip and pixels were smaller but the pixel gap was about the same. This meant that the fill ratio decreased on the RS1 chips to something like 89% from ~92%. JVC's published fill ratio spec seems to vary and I tend to favor the one that came from the published pixel geometry (which I think suggested 89%).

I didn't notice a reduction in dithering artifacts on the Optoma. It seemed about the same as other DLPs and is much more noticeable than a RS1 or RS2. Dithering on the Optoma is more pronounced in darker scenes. Overall, DLP response time is so fast that I don't think that the imaging chip is the limitation but rather the chip that drives it.

I didn't notice a reduction in dithering artifacts on the Optoma. It seemed about the same as other DLPs and is much more noticeable than a RS1 or RS2. Dithering on the Optoma is more pronounced in darker scenes. Overall, DLP response time is so fast that I don't think that the imaging chip is the limitation but rather the chip that drives it.[/QUOTE]

The switching speed limit of the mirrors is about 15 useconds and in a color sequential operation the total frame time for each color is 5.56 milliseconds so the least significant digit if you have 256 gray scales is about 22usec. so the chip is probably the limit not the drive electronics.

I am one of those people who has been on the fence between single chip DLP and JVC LCOS I really like the RS20 because of the deep blacks and the and what I perceive as the stability of the image. still I always seem to pull the trigger on the DLP because of the sharpness

but here I am watching a movie with a light blue sky and if I look close enough the sky shimmers and I keep thinking dgital dither.

I really like the jvc Rs20 but I have been disappointed in the Ansi contrast ratio and I though the limitations were due to the fringing effects of the Tn cell but the papers show that the contrast ratio between cells is greater than a 1000:1 which is really close to the 1100 to:1 of the dlp. My guess is the Moxtek wire grid polarizer is scattering light into the image plane and is the source of the low ANSI contrast.

I don't want to put words in your mouth but I gather from your review that you marginally prefer the JVC RS20 when viewing movies.

Did you find that the colors were richer (deeper) in the RS20 than in the Optima?

"so the chip is probably the limit not the drive electronics. "

What info do you have to support that?

Mark
How do you think the HD8200 compares with the SIM2 D80E? Thanks
I too would like to see how the Sim2 & Optoma compare ,,,

"so the chip is probably the limit not the drive electronics. "

What info do you have to support that?

Mark wrote that DLP response time is so fast that he doesn't think that the imaging chip is the limitation but rather the chip that drives it. This was in response to the consdieration that driving the chip faster should reduce temporal dithering artifacts. Since the speed of the chip is not the limiting factor, the reduction of temporal dithering artifacts is limited by the speed of the chip that drives it. I don't have the ability to confirm these dynamics, I can only follow the logic.

There's really no logic, just the reality of the devices' limitations.

Mark and mlang said opposite things.

I believe Mark is correct from what I've read previously, i.e., 3-chip DLP's have less dither because they have multiple drive electronics chips.

I get the feeling that mlang's comment was ungrounded speculation, perhaps based on the belief that something mechanical must be slower than something electronic.

"so the chip is probably the limit not the drive electronics. "

What info do you have to support that?

I got the number from a wonderful book on projection displays which I refer to often section 5.1.2 page 73 "Projection Displays" second edition Edward H Stupp and Mathew S Brennesholtz This book is the most comprehensive work on projection displays and it is published by Wiley under the Wiley SID series in display technology. SID stands for Society for Information Display It is well written which is rare for engineering monographs

What interests me more is the limitation is contrast of LCOS based projector systems vs DLP. My assumption from working with liquid crystals in the past was that the limitation in contrast was limited by electrical field leakage from one pixel to the next. this of course would degrade the contrast because the leakage would change the orientation of the twisted nematic TN or Vertically aligned VAN. People who work on these cells are reporting contrast ratios between pixels of a 1000:1 which is very close to the 1100:1 oF dlp devices so why does the LCOS systems have such low ANSI contrast values less than 300:1. there has to be a scattering element in the system. My guess in a telecentric system it is the wiregrid moxtek Polarizers and it may be possible to eliminate these as a scattering source through proper optical baffling Theoretically with its 30000:1 on/off contrast a LCOS display a should have a higher ANSI contrast than A DLP display.

You may find that at higher spatial frequencies where scattering does not predominate that the LCOS projectors have as good a contrast as DLP projectors.

By the Way! when I speculate I will say I am speculating. when I give a number I either got it from a paper or a book measured it myself or did the calculations myself

These units are shipping to your local dealer next week. So go out and see if they are that good..I plan on it.

MLang I respect your opinions regardless how other people feel. Calling names and trying to belittle the poster is rampant on these forums. And you have NEVER resorted to such...Good for you!!

A lot of folks have done well on the outside world (money, fame fortune), but have totally forget about the inside world, Which is much more vast and complex.

The switching speed limit of the mirrors is about 15 useconds and in a color sequential operation the total frame time for each color is 5.56 milliseconds so the least significant digit if you have 256 gray scales is about 22usec.If things were linear then 5.56 msecs would give about 22 usec each for 256 levels. But there is gamma too, on top of video black being at 16 in 8 bit space. If we used a strict 2.2 gamma then the level 1 above video black would be about (1/219)^2.2 or about 1/140k from reference white. The next step would be about 1/30k from reference white. So, if white meant the mirrors stayed on for 5.56 msecs then 2 steps from video black would mean the mirrors should go on for about .19 usec and even less for one step from black, using those numbers. It is a little more complicated with things like how fast they should come out of black, limited on/off CR, lamps that can be turned down to hit some dark stuff, doing different things different times that the same colorwheel segment comes by for the same frame, etc.

With the Planar 8150 there is still visible dithering up by the screen for video levels like 20 even with the DI enabled (which should give more time during a dark image like the test pattern I'm thinking of).

--Darin

"the limitation in contrast was limited by electrical field leakage from one pixel to the next. this of course would degrade the contrast because the leakage would change the orientation of the twisted nematic TN or Vertically aligned VAN."

I wouldn't think pixel-pixel CR would have much effect on ANSI CR.

"when I speculate I will say I am speculating. when I give a number I either got it from a paper or a book measured it myself or did the calculations myself"

You didn't give a number, you said "probably", so I assumed that you were speculating.

"the limitation in contrast was limited by electrical field leakage from one pixel to the next. this of course would degrade the contrast because the leakage would change the orientation of the twisted nematic TN or Vertically aligned VAN."

I wouldn't think pixel-pixel CR would have much effect on ANSI CR.

"when I speculate I will say I am speculating. when I give a number I either got it from a paper or a book measured it myself or did the calculations myself"

You didn't give a number, you said "probably", so I assumed that you were speculating.

No what you said was I based my number on un-grounded speculation and I gave you the reference I used.

Hear is a question for you How limited in bandwidth do you think a driver circuit would have to be to be the limit as opposed to the DLP chip

The Nyquist cutoff frequency on the .95 chip will be around 40lp/mm and the cutoff on the .65 chip is close to 60 so all things being equal the larger chip will have higher resolution. The smaller chip will have smaller pixels and less space between the pixels and for many spatial frequencies it may have a better net contrast

I would think they could drive the smaller pixels faster and that should reduce temporal dithering artifacts.

Mark did you notice less dithering artifacts on the screen relative to other DLP projectors you have observed. Did the image seem more stable than other DLP machines in darker scenes.

My understanding was that the ratio of gap size to pixel size is actually larger on the smaller chips, which is to say that the gaps are proportionally larger on smaller chips. Not sure if this affects CR negatively or not.

Have you guys seen the Optoma 8200??
It's fabulous!
OK, sorry I got this off topic. :) :)

The switching speed limit of the mirrors is about 15 useconds


Interesting spec, did that come from your SID reference? Fwiw, my comment about the drive chips being the limit comes from the evolution of previous DLP designs. Most of the improvements in dithering have been due to better drive techniques and improved drive chips.


I am one of those people who has been on the fence between single chip DLP and JVC LCOS I really like the RS20 because of the deep blacks and the and what I perceive as the stability of the image. still I always seem to pull the trigger on the DLP because of the sharpness


You're not alone, a lot of people feel that way. When people say that it's the DLP sharpness that they like, I wonder if what they really mean is ANSI contrast. The 8200 and a good well converged RS20 are very similar in terms of sharpness with a resolution test pattern. I have photos that show this but I haven't had time to post them yet. Where the 8200 really excells though is the added depth due to the ANSI contrast. At least that was my take on it after extended viewing of both.


I really like the jvc Rs20 but I have been disappointed in the Ansi contrast ratio and I though the limitations were due to the fringing effects of the Tn cell but the papers show that the contrast ratio between cells is greater than a 1000:1 which is really close to the 1100 to:1 of the dlp. My guess is the Moxtek wire grid polarizer is scattering light into the image plane and is the source of the low ANSI contrast.


Hold that thought. I'll post these photos soon which shows contrast differences at the pixel level and I think people will be surprised at how good the RS20 performs in comparison to the same sized DLP chip in the 8200. I do think that the ANSI limits in LCOS are probably due to the polarizors. I don't think that e-field fringing and other effects at the pixel level are affecting ANSI although they may play a role in the delineation of individual pixels.


I don't want to put words in your mouth but I gather from your review that you marginally prefer the JVC RS20 when viewing movies.


Even though the RS20 has much less ANSI contrast, I like the RS20 better with movies mainly because of the blacks and depth in dark and mixed scenes. Even in some dark scenes though, it's apparent that the RS20 could benefit from better ANSI. It also has a beautiful smoothness to the image while the 8200 looks a little digital (mostly due to dithering). If a person likes the more digital look, increasing the sharpness and detail settings on the RS20 will help and several people who have RS20's but who prefer DLP's are doing this.


Did you find that the colors were richer (deeper) in the RS20 than in the Optima?

The colors on the 8200 are oversaturated so they do appear deeper. Deeply saturated red hues are also skewed on the 8200 so that they have a touch of purple and look a little like red wine. It's a beautiful hue of red that I haven't seen with other displays and it is a little mesmerizing but it's not accurate. By comparison, the colors on the RS20 are very accurate (at least with the THX mode and the user CMS mode that I use). The net result is that the colors on the RS20 seem more muted but are more realistic.

If things were linear then 5.56 msecs would give about 22 usec each for 256 levels. But there is gamma too, on top of video black being at 16 in 8 bit space. If we used a strict 2.2 gamma then the level 1 above video black would be about (1/219)^2.2 or about 1/140k from reference white. The next step would be about 1/30k from reference white. So, if white meant the mirrors stayed on for 5.56 msecs then 2 steps from video black would mean the mirrors should go on for about .19 usec and even less for one step from black, using those numbers. It is a little more complicated with things like how fast they should come out of black, limited on/off CR, lamps that can be turned down to hit some dark stuff, doing different things different times that the same colorwheel segment comes by for the same frame, etc.

With the Planar 8150 there is still visible dithering up by the screen for video levels like 20 even with the DI enabled (which should give more time during a dark image like the test pattern I'm thinking of).

--Darin

I am aware of the effects of gamma but I do need to play with some models on mathcad to see the system tradeoffs. It can get very complicated because to get those last bits they will use spatial dithering, temporal dithering ,bit splitting and inject noise to mask it all. after that you start playing with image processing filters. and also I think its a matter of at what end you choose to compress the signal although I am surprised that the 8150 with the DI and the variable intensity lamp still produces visible dithering. Still 15 usec is the fastest the chip can turn on and off because of switching transients

Meir DMD pixel mechanism simulation TI Technical Journal 15 64-74

Frankly it is not relevant to the argument at hand which is whether the speed of the chip is limited by the driver chip or the DLP chip



So what do you think is the limit the driver chip or the DLP chip?

So what do you think is the limit the driver chip or the DLP chip?For motion probably the driver chips, but for a static image the DLP chip, or mirror speed. When they went from 720p to 1080p they doubled up to 2 control chips from what I have heard, which helped dithering some. The extra pixels can also help (smaller ants running around to simulate a gray level so to speak).

As far as my comment about motion, I realize each image is static, but I think TI uses some algorithms with changes from image to image.

--Darin

Interesting spec, did that come from your SID reference? Fwiw, my comment about the drive chips being the limit comes from the evolution of previous DLP designs. Most of the improvements in dithering have been due to better drive techniques and improved drive chips.



You may be right. I got the 15 usec from the first reference but from second SID reference Introduction to Microdisplays another can not put it down book
it goes into more detail and attributes the 15 usec limitation to transient under damped ringing but that transient damping time could be lessened by control of the driver circuit.

In the same book its got these beautiful pictures of the orientation of the nematic crystal molecules as a function of the normalized reflectance. it shows the equipotential lines and the lC molecular direction and I could not believe how small the fringing effect was . They showed an MTN cell with a contrast ratio pixel to pixel of 2000:1. Thats almost twice as good as a DLP
chip. The DLP chips contrast ratio according to Texas Instruments is primarily limited by the backscatter from the substrate base the mems mirrors are attached to.

If the chip was the only limitation you should easily get ANSI contrast of 1500:1 Of course since I have not done a goniometric measurement of the polarization components and derived BRDF function for each of those components and than did a complete scatter analysis using ASAP (Arizona Scatter Analysis program) with the BRDF functions I had derived, I am of course only speculating.

Interesting spec, did that come from your SID reference? Fwiw, my comment about the drive chips being the limit comes from the evolution of previous DLP designs. Most of the improvements in dithering have been due to better drive techniques and improved drive chips.



You're not alone, a lot of people feel that way. When people say that it's the DLP sharpness that they like, I wonder if what they really mean is ANSI contrast. The 8200 and a good well converged RS20 are very similar in terms of sharpness with a resolution test pattern. I have photos that show this but I haven't had time to post them yet. Where the 8200 really excells though is the added depth due to the ANSI contrast. At least that was my take on it after extended viewing of both.



Hold that thought. I'll post these photos soon which shows contrast differences at the pixel level and I think people will be surprised at how good the RS20 performs in comparison to the same sized DLP chip in the 8200. I do think that the ANSI limits in LCOS are probably due to the polarizors. I don't think that e-field fringing and other effects at the pixel level are affecting ANSI although they may play a role in the delineation of individual pixels.



Even though the RS20 has much less ANSI contrast, I like the RS20 better with movies mainly because of the blacks and depth in dark and mixed scenes. Even in some dark scenes though, it's apparent that the RS20 could benefit from better ANSI. It also has a beautiful smoothness to the image while the 8200 looks a little digital (mostly due to dithering). If a person likes the more digital look, increasing the sharpness and detail settings on the RS20 will help and several people who have RS20's but who prefer DLP's are doing this.

I own three digital projectors and two liquid coupled gamma corrected CRTs and I completely disagree with respect to the importance of ANSI contrast, at least in a completely light controlled room. The digitals have at least twice the ANSI contrast of my CRTs yet the CRTs don't look even slightly hazy as a scene slowly fades down to near or full black. The closer you get to the entire image fading to black the worse the digitals look and the better the CRTs look! Personally I'll take higher on/off C.R. over ANSI any time.
The higher the on/off C.R. for a particular digital the better it looks in dark scenes even though the ANSI contrast of that particular projector may not be as high as some of the other digitals.

If a person likes the more digital look, increasing the sharpness and detail settings on the RS20 will help and several people who have RS20's but who prefer DLP's are doing this.

The colors on the 8200 are oversaturated so they do appear deeper. Deeply saturated red hues are also skewed on the 8200 so that they have a touch of purple and look a little like red wine. It's a beautiful hue of red that I haven't seen with other displays and it is a little mesmerizing but it's not accurate. .

I prefer the DLP look, yet as somebody who shoots video professionally, I hate it when video cameras have their detail circuits turned up too high(sports, news). Any ringing from enhancement added in post-production on a movie drives me crazy. I had a Sony industrial CRT projector for over 10 years, yet once I saw DLP, the LCOS look just never grabbed me. Doesn't have the 3D effect or the pop in mixed field scenes for me.

When I got my HD81-LV in 2007, I noticed the wine colored reds immediately. It was really an issue when trying to watch the Ferrari F1 cars!
Brilliant Color seemed to exacerbate the problem, even though the circuit made the projector look plus green when turned up higher.

I really believe the ANSI contrast of a good DLP display pays dividends with mixed field scenes, to me the handling of very bright areas looks more filmlike--not filmlike as in viewing a movie on a CRT, but on a 35mm projector.

For motion probably the driver chips, but for a static image the DLP chip, or mirror speed. When they went from 720p to 1080p they doubled up to 2 control chips from what I have heard, which helped dithering some. The extra pixels can also help (smaller ants running around to simulate a gray level so to speak).

As far as my comment about motion, I realize each image is static, but I think TI uses some algorithms with changes from image to image.

--Darin

The calculation you made with gamma at 2.2 has made me realize that the dithering problem is much bigger problem than I thought. If the 15 usec switching speed is current and I have not seen any other number, than you either have to dither temporally or spatially over a number of frames or just simply let shadow detail go to hell in dark scenes. The DI helps and the pulsed lamp helps but not enough to eliminate it entirely

I own a Sim2 ht380 and it is very sharp and the cms system is very good and with the pulsed lamp the reds are deep but put a light blue sky up on the screen and it is ant time.

even so the 8200 seems to be a great buy and with the DI probably outperforms my more expensive Sim2 Ht380

I own three digital projectors and two liquid coupled gamma corrected CRTs and I completely disagree with respect to the importance of ANSI contrast, at least in a completely light controlled room. The digitals have at least twice the ANSI contrast of my CRTs yet the CRTs don't look even slightly hazy as a scene slowly fades down to near or full black. The closer you get to the entire image fading to black the worse the digitals look and the better the CRTs look! Personally I'll take higher on/off C.R. over ANSI any time.
The higher the on/off C.R. for a particular digital the better it looks in dark scenes even though the ANSI contrast of that particular projector may not be as high as some of the other digitals.

A lot of display engineers will agree with you and some people have deliberately degraded Ansi contrast say from 500:1 to 100:1 and nobody could tell the difference but lets not go there.

The huge advantage CRTs have over digital besides the on /off contrast is the large format. The Nyquist cutoff frequency on a CRT is around 8lp/mm where as in a digital projector it is between 40 and 60. The lens is a huge limiter on the contrast at higher spatial frequencies in Digital projector because the chip is so small.

I own three digital projectors and two liquid coupled gamma corrected CRTs and I completely disagree with respect to the importance of ANSI contrast, at least in a completely light controlled room. The digitals have at least twice the ANSI contrast of my CRTs yet the CRTs don't look even slightly hazy as a scene slowly fades down to near or full black. The closer you get to the entire image fading to black the worse the digitals look and the better the CRTs look! Personally I'll take higher on/off C.R. over ANSI any time.
The higher the on/off C.R. for a particular digital the better it looks in dark scenes even though the ANSI contrast of that particular projector may not be as high as some of the other digitals.

I think if you go back and read what I wrote that there isn't any disagreement. I prefer the RS20 over the 8200 because of the higher on/off even though it has about 3x less ANSI contrast. After spending a lot of tme with the 8200 though, I do think that ANSI contrast is very important and there is an element to picture quality that is missing with displays that have lower ANSI contrast.

Taking fairly bright content like a football game for example. If a person takes a good quality 1080i HD feed from say NBC and feeds it into a good quality 1080p display, the image will generally look fantastic. On a high ANSI contrast display though it's just a bit better. Bright content next to dark content stands out better and I think some people say that it looks sharper, but I prefer the term that it has more depth. The reason that I don't like to use the term sharper is because I reserve that for a resolution test pattern and the ANSI contrast isn't as much of a factor down at the pixel level with this type of a pattern.

You may be right. I got the 15 usec from the first reference but from second SID reference Introduction to Microdisplays another can not put it down book
it goes into more detail and attributes the 15 usec limitation to transient under damped ringing but that transient damping time could be lessened by control of the driver circuit.


That makes sense. I'll bet that there is also a lot of things that can be done to improve the chip switching time too once the drive chips aren't a performance bottleneck.


In the same book its got these beautiful pictures of the orientation of the nematic crystal molecules as a function of the normalized reflectance. it shows the equipotential lines and the lC molecular direction and I could not believe how small the fringing effect was . They showed an MTN cell with a contrast ratio pixel to pixel of 2000:1. Thats almost twice as good as a DLP
chip. The DLP chips contrast ratio according to Texas Instruments is primarily limited by the backscatter from the substrate base the mems mirrors are attached to.


That's interesting. I think that fringing is also dependent on the thickness of the LC layer relative to the width of a pixel and and the LC layer keeps getting thinner which each generation of panel (which is done mostly to improve panel response).

Leakage and backscatter into the substrate has also been a problem with LCOS. The improved contrast on the RS1 was due in part because JVC had plugged some of the holes in the light blocking layer that allowed light to bounce around inside of the backplane and pop up somewhere else. There was a lot of good technical information from JVC when the RS1 was released which seems to have disappeared. One of the photos shows light illuminating a pre-RS1 JVC backplane and it's surprising how much light leakage there was before the gaps in the blocking layer were fixed.

This is very informative. Although this does leave one to question whether the flux capacitor contributes to luminous intensity variation capacity as defined by the Weber contrast method or to the Michelson contrast method.

That makes sense. I'll bet that there is also a lot of things that can be done to improve the chip switching time too once the drive chips aren't a performance bottleneck.



That's interesting. I think that fringing is also dependent on the thickness of the LC layer relative to the width of a pixel and and the LC layer keeps getting thinner which each generation of panel (which is done mostly to improve panel response).

Leakage and backscatter into the substrate has also been a problem with LCOS. The improved contrast on the RS1 was due in part because JVC had plugged some of the holes in the light blocking layer that allowed light to bounce around inside of the backplane and pop up somewhere else. There was a lot of good technical information from JVC when the RS1 was released which seems to have disappeared. One of the photos shows light illuminating a pre-RS1 JVC backplane and it's surprising how much light leakage there was before the gaps in the blocking layer were fixed.

You could replace the wiregrid polarizers in the RS20 with calcite polarizers having individual extinction ratios of 100,000:1 and no scatter problems. It would be horribly expensive but it would make a huge difference in the ANSI contrast.

Thread marker

Art's Review is out for all who were waiting.....:)

Optoma HD8200 Projector Review - Overview (http://www.projectorreviews.com/optoma/hd8200/index.php)

I actually ordered a unit yesterday afternoon... couldn't wait for the review any longer.

Nay Sayers be damned! For the price, too hard to pass up. Hope it's here by the weekend!

Nothing like delivery day on a new projector. I usually just throw up a quick setup just to get started, then get serious later. enjoy

Yes congrats you will love it

There has been a lot of talk about the Planar 8150. Just curious what is the price point on that projector?

Double the price of the HD8200 and they're close cousins, very similar.

Art of projectorreviews says here (http://www.projectorreviews.com/optoma/hd8200/image.php) in his review of hd8200:
HD8200 Black Levels & Shadow Detail

Black level performance of the HD8200 is pretty darn good. I have run the HD8200 side by side against the JVC RS20, the Epson Home Cinema 6500UB and others. While the HD8200 can't match most of the ultra-high-contrast 3LCD projectors it comes very close to the Sanyo PLV-Z3000, the least expensive of those, and the one with the least impressive blacks. The HD8200 is comparable, and possibly a bit better in black levels than the BenQ W5000. I reviewed the two projectors a full year apart, so it's hard to confirm that, but, let's say that the HD8200 should be as least as good as the W5000.
That doesnt sound like pd8150 at all - which has been said to be almost as good as rs2 in on/off and blacks. Multiblitz had this (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15960374&highlight=#post15960374) to say about optoma. So who's closer to the truth?

Tons at CES that saw the projector loved it, blacks / 3D ansi/ brightness / colors all of it. Mostly nobody noticed the Iris in action also. I think what we have on the newer DLP iris technology just like with the LCD DI's is some people are very sensitive while most others aren't.
I read a guy in the Multiblitz thread you posted had two Planars and just couldn't take the iris. See what I mean.

I thought the iris worked well in the demo machine I got and I found the pictures mesmerizing. Good stuff mon!

Double the price of the HD8200 and they're close cousins, very similar.
I guess if you remove personal bias they may not seem that similar.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=16186505#post16186505

Well I've had mine up for a day now, and have watched it too much... OK not really. Picked up Kung-fu Panda BD for the occasion, and have watched it 2.5 times today. Has great WAF too - she even said WOW, and she thinks the old one was just fine. No it probably doesn't have RS20 black. I've been using the superwide (which is cool!) and it doesn't quite fit on my screen - I get about 1" of unused space at the bottom. It doesn't disappear into black velvet border. but if it did fill your screen, you probably wouldn't notice unless you were looking for it. Great "depth" and 3-dimensionality. I used cinema 2 for a while, and although I think I spotted a brightness change once, I used it last night for few hours and forgot it was on. After a while I realized I liked cinema1 better - not so dark and a bit better pop.

The scenes in KFP where they look at the ceiling where the dragon scroll is, the whole dragon head thing seems to really "come out from the ceiling" 3-d wise. Another thing that just floored me was the firework scenes - the color that was produced from the "rocket chairs" is just incredible - like nothing my old PJ could do. Not sure how the LCOS machines would handle that bright jewel toned colors and the rest of the normal scene.

The PureMotion (FI) really does work. It is probably the most noticeable feature this has. I think on movies I would turn it off or down to 1, but for video - WOW! I used it on Planet Earth BD and it is smooth. Can't wait for some Final 4 on it.

The colors are great - but it wouldn't take much to be a vast improvement over my last PJ. - I am just so thankful that I no longer have screwed up yellows! Football season will be enjoyable - atleast for the goal post shots.

Taking good screen shots is harder than it looks (as everyone says) but I will work on some soon.

I couldn't be happier!

Yeah! all set now 1080 pixel match up. I heard mentioned you don't see much of a difference going to 1080p from 720p, not my opinion I've seen the difference it's huge. My H79 DC3 started looking soft after using the HD8200. My wife also was shocked at how better the HD8200 is.

Cin2
"I used it last night for few hours and forgot it was on"

I did the same thing, after watching a movie I checked to see what I was using, just like you I said kwap! I was watching Cin2 all the time.

Yeah! all set now 1080 pixel match up. I heard mentioned you don't see much of a difference going to 1080p from 720p, not my opinion I've seen the difference it's huge. My H79 DC3 started looking soft after using the HD8200. My wife also was shocked at how better the HD8200 is.


Were you thinking I said this? NO WAY MAN! 1080p ROCKS! way better than 720. Just so you know, I'm not the "discerning" viewer. I'm coming from a panny 700u that had a) one of the first smoothscreen implementations, b) each panel was a full pixel off misconverged (every "single" line had RGB lines) c) 2700 hours on the bulb... the blurryness made my eyes hurt. So it can be said that this DLP sharpness has me blown away, throw the 1080p in there, and I'm just jaw-dropped.

"Were you thinking I said this?" No it was just trail of statements speically when 1080p first started appearing. I tried the Pany AX100 sold it in a week, I'm too use to the sharpess in the images which good DLP's have always had. The HD8200 goes another step futher with this 700 ansi contrast, nice.

I'm still waiting for my buddies offer on me buying an HD8200, nothing back yet. I want one :)

So another day of playing with the 8200. Tried lots of different things. turned the RGB color deal in the PS3 from limited to full. I was watching Full Metal Jacket BD at the time - it was hard to tell a difference - it was an outdoor marching scene - bright. later on I do think it helped.

Turned the AI (lamp modulation) on and turned on cinema2. (still FMJ) and watched for quite a while, but was catching some iris flicker. turned it back to cinema1 and left the AI on. Left for a while, dinner, etc. Came back tonight and watched Iron Man BD with my wife, (cinema1 and AI) and WOW! never saw any light "pumping". will have to watch kung fu panda again to see if the AI adds better blacks than when I watched it yesterday without AI.

Anyway Hoops tomorrow night! Love this thing!

I get members asking if Optoma has a firmware fix for the HD8200. I called in today and there is no fix firmware, the machines working fine. They are working on a firmware which they say will add slight improvements. It will be available over the internet but many will probably not bother with it.

Maybe if you are a calibrator you might add it because all it will do is let the internal test patterns the projector has stay up longer. Right now the stay up 10 seconds, this will be lengthened. The other thing is when displaying Red, Green, Blue patterns the projector will improve on holding sync for these color patterns.

If you're not a calibrator you could probably live without the improvements. So there's no reason to be sitting on the fence waiting for something major. Again down the road you can apply these slight improvements from the interenet.

I find Pure Detail set at 1 is a big improvement, bit like adding smart sharpen to a digital Photo in Photoshop

I upgraded from the H78 and the difference is huge

"I upgraded from the H78 and the difference is huge"

That's saying something because I have the H78/79 now and it's picture difference compared to the HD2+ machines is huge. The HD8200 I had here is a giant step up from the H79 DC3.

There's tons of items to fiddle with in the HD8200, keep looking around, enjoy.

I'm not letting this go yet. The 8200 has issues with the iris at setting 2. It has issues with color repro (se the thread with the PCs trying to get the 8200 to show colors on a dark background*). Kind of a forced 16:9 "overscan" problem instead of 1:1 pixel mapping. Etc.

And you uphold your view that it's not necessary with a better firmware? Maybe more than firmware is needed to fix these issues? I don't know.

Why isn't AVS selling this proj if everything is golden?

Again, I'm very happy with my H79 but was hoping this new 8200 to be a good replacement.

I'm not letting this go yet. The 8200 has issues with the iris at setting 2. It has issues with color repro (se the thread with the PCs trying to get the 8200 to show colors on a dark background*). Kind of a forced 16:9 "overscan" problem instead of 1:1 pixel mapping. Etc.

And you uphold your view that it's not necessary with a better firmware? Maybe more than firmware is needed to fix these issues? I don't know.

Why isn't AVS selling this proj if everything is golden?

Again, I'm very happy with my H79 but was hoping this new 8200 to be a good replacement.

I would agree that the iris is not the best, is there a PJ that has perfect Iris control? Switch it off

Have you seen this PJ?

I would agree that the iris is not the best, is there a PJ that has perfect Iris control? Switch it off

Have you seen this PJ?

Without the iris, you'd be back to a native CR of less than 2000:1. It would just be a dimmer version of an HD81-LV, albeit quieter with more placement flexibility and the PureMotion feature which I'm not a fan of for movies.

The HD8200 auto iris is much better than my HD81-LV, but not as good as some other auto iris applications found in DLP models. I only saw the 8200 for an hour's worth of viewing and with difficult material(Dark Knight), but I think I could live with Cinema 1 setting, even though I saw it changing on some scenes. The blacks are so much better than the native CR of most any DLP projector that this is the number one reason to buy an HD8200, IMO.

I'm not letting this go yet. The 8200 has issues with the iris at setting 2. It has issues with color repro (se the thread with the PCs trying to get the 8200 to show colors on a dark background*). Kind of a forced 16:9 "overscan" problem instead of 1:1 pixel mapping. Etc.

And you uphold your view that it's not necessary with a better firmware? Maybe more than firmware is needed to fix these issues? I don't know.

Why isn't AVS selling this proj if everything is golden?

Again, I'm very happy with my H79 but was hoping this new 8200 to be a good replacement.


Even the engineers prefer Cin1, Cin2 was added as an option that's more aggressive. It can work well for certain material, I've been fooled and watched a whole movie in what I thought was Cin1 and turned out I had it set for Cin2. Like I said it's just an option, they could have left it out all together than it would be like the Planar or BenQ which have no options. Cin2 won't be changed if a user doesn't like it don't use it. But it's there to test with different material if you like.

Can't comment on PC's I don't use them with projectors and didn't test one.

Paolino's Optoma HD8200 pics in the "show us your screenshots" thread are some of the sharpest, clearest and most vibrant pics I have ever seen on AVS . Good work Paolino.

Either this guy is a brilliant photographer or the HD8200 is the real deal..or both!!

Joey

Paolino's Optoma HD8200 pics in the "show us your screenshots" thread are some of the sharpest, clearest and most vibrant pics I have ever seen on AVS . Good work Paolino.

Either this guy is a brilliant photographer or the HD8200 is the real deal..or both!!

Joey

Paolino's shots are amazing. I think he said he has an HD80. I posted some shots over there last night with my new HD8200.

There has been a lot of talk about the Planar 8150. Just curious what is the price point on that projector?


The Planar PD8150 is now $6,999 with the standard lens. The PD8130 is $5,999 with the standard lens. Both of the Planar models use the 0.95" DMD while the Optoma uses the smaller, lower cost 0.65" DMD; one of the factors, I assume, allowing its $4,999 list price.

Due to the larger DMD, the Planar needs larger more expensive optics. A benefit is increased brightness, contrast, sharpness and uniformity while allowing for greater vertical lens shift. The larger DMD in the Planar also allows it to be brighter given a similar lamp wattage (the Planar uses a 230W lamp with Unishape to improve color bit depth). I would be surprised if the Optoma could achieve 1300 lumens at 220W (Art was able to achieve a maximum of 691 lumens in 'reference' mode at color temperature of 7335K).

The Planar is individually calibrated for only one DynamicBlack setting. We have found that a DB multiplier that is too large becomes distracting, or one that is too low has no effect. You also have to make sure the DB aperture moves at the correct speed (not too fast or slow) and has no lag. Art comments on the DB settings on the Optoma's Cinema 2 setting as "very annoying and could not enjoy watching the projector".

As the reviews have shown, the Planar's color calibration is very accurate out-of-the-box (as Art points out "almost dead on for white" at 6422K pre-calibration), where as the Optoma per his review was "pretty far off the mark" at 7210K pre-calibration. Having a color wheel designed so that the native color temperature is as close to D65 as possible will keep lumens from dropping as you calibrate.

The Planar also uses a more expensive video processor, the Gennum 9450 which is the follow-on processor to the 9351 used in a few of the 'famous' external video processor so often talked about on the forum.

I hope this has helped.

The Planar PD8150 is now $6,999 with the standard lens. The PD8130 is $5,999 with the standard lens. Both of the Planar models use the 0.95" DMD while the Optoma uses the smaller, lower cost 0.65" DMD; one of the factors, I assume, allowing its $4,999 list price.

Due to the larger DMD, the Planar needs larger more expensive optics. A benefit is increased brightness, contrast, sharpness and uniformity while allowing for greater vertical lens shift. The larger DMD in the Planar also allows it to be brighter given a similar lamp wattage (the Planar uses a 230W lamp with Unishape to improve color bit depth). I would be surprised if the Optoma could achieve 1300 lumens at 220W (Art was able to achieve a maximum of 691 lumens in 'reference' mode at color temperature of 7335K).

The Planar is individually calibrated for only one DynamicBlack setting. We have found that a DB multiplier that is too large becomes distracting, or one that is too low has no effect. You also have to make sure the DB aperture moves at the correct speed (not too fast or slow) and has no lag. Art comments on the DB settings on the Optoma's Cinema 2 setting as "very annoying and could not enjoy watching the projector".

As the reviews have shown, the Planar's color calibration is very accurate out-of-the-box (as Art points out "almost dead on for white" at 6422K pre-calibration), where as the Optoma per his review was "pretty far off the mark" at 7210K pre-calibration. Having a color wheel designed so that the native color temperature is as close to D65 as possible will keep lumens from dropping as you calibrate.

The Planar also uses a more expensive video processor, the Gennum 9450 which is the follow-on processor to the 9351 used in a few of the 'famous' external video processor so often talked about on the forum.

I hope this has helped.

Is there any truth that teh firmware update for the PD8150 has improved the contrast at all? Also, is there a "PD8160" planned for later this year? DC4 maybe.

You guy's should be posting in the Planer thread.

Guitarman,

Could you also comment on the other features... frame interpolation, super wide, fan/color wheel noise, best vs. brightest modes. Thanks! I use my PJ for gaming much of the percentage of time, so the FI is factor over, say the JVC RS-10, and the ability to utilize the superwide, may allow me to put off CIH for a while.

So are there any opinions of how the Optima HD8200 stands up to the Infocus IN83? DC3 vs DC4? I'm not sure what the chip size is in the IN83 but I'm pretty sure the color wheel speed is 6x in the HD8200 and 4x in the IN83. Lots of lumens from both. Or is this even a good comparison?

So are there any opinions of how the Optima HD8200 stands up to the Infocus IN83? DC3 vs DC4? Or is this even a good comparison?

The IN83 is a great projector--good lumens, natural colors, sharp--but it doesn't have an auto iris, so the HD8200 should have superior CR in Cine1 AI mode.

Guitarman,

Could you also comment on the other features... frame interpolation, super wide, fan/color wheel noise, best vs. brightest modes. Thanks! I use my PJ for gaming much of the percentage of time, so the FI is factor over, say the JVC RS-10, and the ability to utilize the superwide, may allow me to put off CIH for a while.

This PJ is super quiet, it's hard to tell it's even on. I just ran a 24fps signal and movement was smooth it worked well. I also used the advanced picture features and they looked good to me. There's one that gives you a split screen so you can see the difference. And you could see the difference, I liked what it did it added even more dimension.

Hi all,

I presently have an Optoma HD72 projecting onto a matte white (1.0 gain) 92". My next upgrade is probably to the HD82 (in Europe), I would like to increase the screen size to 106", no problem but I have always thought that I should go for a grey screen this time (0.8 gain) as I have very light carpet walls and white ceiling, resulting in a lot of reflection back into the room and damaging black levels. However looking at projector central calculator I will only get about 13fl image brightness with a grey screen at 106" is this going to be enough as at the moment the HD72 on the 92" is giving about 26fl?

So, is the HD82 going to be bright enough to cope?

Does the HD82 have sufficient native contrast such that I don't need to go for a grey screen, as my blacks will be better compared the HD72?

Cheers for any help, I'm really confused right now....

Hi all,

I presently have an Optoma HD72 projecting onto a matte white (1.0 gain) 92". My next upgrade is probably to the HD82 (in Europe), I would like to increase the screen size to 106", no problem but I have always thought that I should go for a grey screen this time (0.8 gain) as I have very light carpet walls and white ceiling, resulting in a lot of reflection back into the room and damaging black levels. However looking at projector central calculator I will only get about 13fl image brightness with a grey screen at 106" is this going to be enough as at the moment the HD72 on the 92" is giving about 26fl?

So, is the HD82 going to be bright enough to cope?

Does the HD82 have sufficient native contrast such that I don't need to go for a grey screen, as my blacks will be better compared the HD72?

Cheers for any help, I'm really confused right now....

I'll try to answer a bit of your concern. I have the HD8200, now for about 2 weeks. I had a panny ae700u 3 lcd. I have a 92" 16x9 homemade matte white. I mask my screen and can do about 104" 2.35 and have been "zooming". I posted a few pictures in the screenshot thread, and they are zoomed.

The optoma looks way better with moderate lights on than my panny did. Very watchable for sports and casual viewing.

I have a sample pack from Da-lite and have tried taping them up to my screen just to see (cinema vision, HC cinema vision, and pearlescent) and I could not really see any benefit from any of them - I could not see any help from HC in darker blacks. If I get a chance I'll try to take an ambient light shot with the 2 gray samples taped up that I have. I'm working on mounting an anamorphic lens right now, but will try to get to it. I'll try zooming it out to about 106" 16x9 for you as well.

My room has white walls and ceiling and I used a dalite high power screen when testing the HD8200. Black levels and brightness were great. If I remember right my light meter got 700lumens on the 106" screen. Not accounting adding for any screen gains, 1.0 calculation. Plus that measurement was at near max throw, If I setup closer to the screen you could add one or two hundred lumens to that figure.

700lumens is quiet allot, a Marantz or Seleco will start out at 350lumens on my screen. The HD82 is bright enough.

I think you would be happier with a white screen for the purer whites. Dalite High Power is a good choice. Or the Firehawk is another, good for refelctions whites are still good.

The optoma looks way better with moderate lights on than my panny did. Very watchable for sports and casual viewing.

I have a sample pack from Da-lite and have tried taping them up to my screen just to see (cinema vision, HC cinema vision, and pearlescent) and I could not really see any benefit from any of them - I could not see any help from HC in darker blacks. If I get a chance I'll try to take an ambient light shot with the 2 gray samples taped up that I have. I'm working on mounting an anamorphic lens right now, but will try to get to it. I'll try zooming it out to about 106" 16x9 for you as well.


Thanks for this, I do watch a mixture of sports as well as films, perhaps white is the best way to go. I just get a huge amount of reflected light at the moment and the bigger screen will be even worse, hence my grey screen thoughts.

My room has white walls and ceiling and I used a dalite high power screen when testing the HD8200. Black levels and brightness were great. If I remember right my light meter got 700lumens on the 106" screen. Not accounting adding for any screen gains, 1.0 calculation. Plus that measurement was at near max throw, If I setup closer to the screen you could add one or two hundred lumens to that figure.

700lumens is quiet allot, a Marantz or Seleco will start out at 350lumens on my screen. The HD82 is bright enough.

I think you would be happier with a white screen for the purer whites. Dalite High Power is a good choice. Or the Firehawk is another, good for refelctions whites are still good.

Thanks, I was quite surprised using projector central calculator that they reckon the HD72 and the HD82 have the same image brightness, give the lumens being quoted for the HD82.

I'm not too keen on high gain screens as the ones I have seen produce bad sparklies. I want the pop from the white screen, do you think that'll may go missing on a grey screen given that the HD82 appears pretty bright?

Trouble with screens is that it is almost impossible to audition.....

"If I remember right my light meter got 700lumens on the 106" screen. Not accounting adding for any screen gains, 1.0 calculation...700lumens is quiet allot,"

Depending on the gain you're getting from the HP in your setup, that 700 L could be as low as 250 L.

The light meter is located at the screen distance facing the projector so the 700 lumens is correct. You could add some gain on top of that because I had the PJ mounted down from the ceiling. The lens would be just 3' from my eyes, there's gain from the HP I can see it, I'm not totally out of the cone.

Thanks, I was quite surprised using projector central calculator that they reckon the HD72 and the HD82 have the same image brightness, give the lumens being quoted for the HD82.

I'm not too keen on high gain screens as the ones I have seen produce bad sparklies. I want the pop from the white screen, do you think that'll may go missing on a grey screen given that the HD82 appears pretty bright?

Trouble with screens is that it is almost impossible to audition.....

I tried a gray screen and didn't like the muted whites. Look up some reviews on the High Power material you'll find mostly positive talk. No sparklies, non tensioned pull downs show flat images. In the cone you'll get the full 2.8 gain so the closer you can mount the projectors lens to your eye level the brighter it will be. If the HP is out a Carada brilliant white or Dalite Cinema Vision are a couple more choices

all you guys with the 8200 happy ?? as Im about to buy this week in Hong Kong unless you tell me something really bad.......

all you guys with the 8200 happy ?? as Im about to buy this week in Hong Kong unless you tell me something really bad.......

I am more impressed with mine with every viewing. Very happy buyer here.

I really like this unit, but am worried about the quality. In another thread, it was stated that Jason said all units sold by AVS were returned, and that they will not sell Optoma due to QC issues.

Can anyone here shed some light on this?

Ben

I Viewed with the Optoma 8200 & the Sim D80e yesterday in Hong Kong. Now Im more confused than ever,,, both looked great, the Sim is a little more expensive than the 8200 in HK. but it has a few more toys like power zoom / focus etc , other than that, both pictures looked almost the same. Optoma was a little brighter i guess.
Any help appreciated....

I really like this unit, but am worried about the quality. In another thread, it was stated that Jason said all units sold by AVS were returned, and that they will not sell Optoma due to QC issues.

Can anyone here shed some light on this?

Ben

Like I said, I love it. I love the high ANSI "pop" and "wow". The intrascene blacks are great. The sharpness is great and it's quiet. The lens shift works great. The Frame Interpolation works great. It has vertical stretch. Many, many pluses. I have had it now for about 3 weeks so long term quality is unknown. If you think Optoma has a bad rap... then you decide. If you think that there are no perfect products, and for the price, this unit is a good deal.... then you decide.

There is an Iris mode called cinema2 that is "very aggressive" (term used by Optoma?) that is annoying. Some say it is defective and return the machine. Optoma says it's an aggressive software algorithm and not defective. Cinema1 works great, and to me, it's hard to tell the difference.

Thanks Sandwedg & Ben, Optoma seems to have a good reputation here in HK, its very popular in China and the warranty is 2 years I think. Im 99% sold on this unit. wish it had power zoom though, as Ive bought a 2:355 from Stewart.
Thanks for the info on the Cinema 2, I wonder if a firmware fix may improve this setting in time.

Thanks for the info on the Cinema 2, I wonder if a firmware fix may improve this setting in time.


Optoma said they were gonna leave the setting where it is in case people want to use it. It's not broken, just too agressive. I've used it a couple times and on some material it works well but on MOST it is too agressive and I don't use it. Cinema 1 is really good.

Scott

blackdragon1,

Note that TrustedReviews gave the Optoma HD82 (which I believe is the same projector as the HD8200) a score of 9 out of a possible 10 in design, features, image quality, value and overall. Only the motion processing su*ked.

www.trustedreviews.com/tvs/review/2009/04/20/Optoma-ThemeScene-HD82/p1

Also, Evan, in further testing, has found a technical glich which caused the HD8200 to quote: ".....lose its video calibrations when switching sources. Optoma duplicated the problem, identified a fix and is issuing a firmware update."

www.projectorcentral.com/projector_news.cfm?2009-04-23-Coming-reviews&entry_id=238

Hi all,

I presently have an Optoma HD72 projecting onto a matte white (1.0 gain) 92". My next upgrade is probably to the HD82 (in Europe), I would like to increase the screen size to 106", no problem but I have always thought that I should go for a grey screen this time (0.8 gain) as I have very light carpet walls and white ceiling, resulting in a lot of reflection back into the room and damaging black levels. However looking at projector central calculator I will only get about 13fl image brightness with a grey screen at 106" is this going to be enough as at the moment the HD72 on the 92" is giving about 26fl?

So, is the HD82 going to be bright enough to cope?

Does the HD82 have sufficient native contrast such that I don't need to go for a grey screen, as my blacks will be better compared the HD72?

Cheers for any help, I'm really confused right now....

Sorry for taking so long to get back to this - was on a trip most of the week.

Here are 3 pics - just of my PS3 home screen zoomed out to 106"d. I put up a sample of Da-lite High Contrast Cinema Vision. It was brighter in the room than the picture of the lights makes it seem.

http://www.mottfamilyreunion.com/Files/forum_photos/20090425/DSC_0135.JPG
http://www.mottfamilyreunion.com/Files/forum_photos/20090425/DSC_0136.JPG
http://www.mottfamilyreunion.com/Files/forum_photos/20090425/DSC_0137.JPG

I was hoping there would be some HD signal on (I only have OTA) but at 10:30 in the morning there wasn't any.

Strange thing. I have switched Dynamic Black off but it still seeems to be on ie you can see the iris going on and off. Need to check this for sure with no sound so I can hear the iris.

Anyone else heard/seen of this?

EDIT:
OK Have read the review again AI was switched on which I believe would give a similar effect for DB Iris so have switched it off, need to watch a film as a check

Now you can really see how good the Dynamic Black is because AI is very noticable. Try Cinema 1 DB choice for most movies, mess around with Cinema 2 just for a test. The other video enhancing options are excellent also.

Now you can really see how good the Dynamic Black is because AI is very noticable. Try Cinema 1 DB choice for most movies, mess around with Cinema 2 just for a test. The other video enhancing options are excellent also.
Out of interet which other enhancement do you have running?

I have tried Pure Motion but often causes artifacts. Iron Man is a good example - Near the begining when he is in the HumVee the soldier next to him asks for a photo by raising his hand. With Pure Motion set to 1 watch his fingers as they move past the glass.

Therefore I tend to keep this off

I like Cinema1, no AI.

PureMotion (FI) is great for HD sports and HDTV, games, and animated movies.
I like the 24fps for non-animated movies so I turn it off for that. I like that you can see that it really works when you put it on high and it makes "iron man" or whatever look like a tv show.

I think I leave pure color on 1, and pure detail off or 1. I use the settings from Art's projectorreviews.com review.

Interesting, I find Pure Detail makes a big improvement, like sharpening in Photoshop :) Tens to keep Pur Coloiur off as the colours are already slightly over saturated

So did you not see the artifacts when Pure Motion is on

I haven't seen any artifacts when using the Pure Motion - just the fact that it really does smooth things out, gets rid of the choppiness of the 24fps. I did watch the NCAA championship game with it on high and was a bit concerned about artifacts, but it turns out the broadcast quality was regarded as sub-par.

anyone compare the 82 to the Epson 6500? I would really appreciate any comments on how they compare.