Vivitek H5080 Projector - Image Quality 3

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Art Feierman

Overall Color & Picture Quality

Brilliant! The H5080 is bright, it has excellent skin tones, and for the most part, the color is great. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't always seem to be really film-like, almost like there's some "Brilliant Color" type dynamic processing going on (there is - Dynamic Black is always on), even when I'm not using those features. Still, I'm quibbling. It is as film-like as the Epson 8500UB, but in a different way. Not the best, but "close enough." As an added bonus, the Vivitek has an very sharp image. I only regret that its black level performance isn't a little bit better, for that would make this projector downright formidable at its price point. Sports look particularly good, I should note.

Watching movies, I again, immediately appreciate the lumens, the H5080 has no trouble at all dealing with my 128" high contrast gray screen, something very few competitors can claim.

Click Image to Enlarge

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A mix of additional images to show off the H5080 home theater projector:

From the DVE-HD test disc:

And here are a few more images:

The very bottom line on overall image quality and color: The H5080 looks truly great. The dark scenes could, of course stand to have even blacker blacks but the H5080 delivers perfectly good black levels for a premium projector.

Only the dynamic iris action, on some darker scenes, blemishes the overall image performance. And that's primarily a technical complaint as you'll only occasionally notice it, and very few likely to overly object. Great picture!

Vivitek H5080U Projector: Performance, HDTV and Sports

With well over 1200 lumens at my disposal, I was able to do an impressive image on the 92 inch Screen Innovations Black Diamond 1.4. For the shot below, the recessed lights are on, illuminating the chairs on the left and right. I was able to watch with a pretty decent picture with both french door windows open. Keep in mind that the SI screen in many ways resembles my Firehawk G3. The Black Diamond 1.4, however, is better at "rejecting" overhead lighting, but not as good with side lighting. As such, the SI screen didn't do as well in my room in the daytime, but better in the evening... Still, no problems. This is a small screen, and could tackle even the door window shades up, fairly well.

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Being brave, I opened the shade on the large window by the screen. With the gray day outside, the projector still looked pretty darn good, with reasonably bright colors, The ambient light is washing out any blacks and very dark colors a bit, but still very watchable as seen in the photo here:

Now, we must all realize that if this was a bright sunny day, with sunlight coming in that window, the results would be completely different, it would be unwatchable. Having said that, with just over 1150 lumens, the H5080 is definitely one of the brighter home theater projectors around without getting up into the big bucks for a 3 chip DLP. Brighter, although not sensationally so. Just a good bright projector. Not quite as bright as, say the Epson UB projectors, but about half way between those, and the average home theater projectors. The Vivitek will deliver color better than those Epson's at their brightest.

The Vivitek H5080 image is very sharp. And the color and skin tones, even in "brightest" mode, with some ambient light, looked reasonably great.

While the H5080 does offer creative frame interpolation (CFI), it doesn't apply it when receiving standard 60fps content like a nice football game!

That's right, you've got CFI for your 24fps movies (when using it is questionable, as it "changes the director's intent"), but it's great for sports, where most folks appreciate having it. I hope they (and Optoma) get their act together for the next model.

We could wish for just about any projector to be brighter for watching sports, but few quality home theater projectors are significantly brighter, unless you are looking to spend four or five times the price. That said, I watched some recorded football, and, a few innings of baseball. The picture was bright and vibrant, and held up rather well under more controlled ambient light, than I can torture most other projectors.