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HD65 Projector Screen Recommendations

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Art Feierman

HD65 Projector Screen Recommendations

If you are buying the HD65 because you want a great little projector, no muss, no fussing around, and aren't worried about the last bit of black levels, etc., I think a nice white surface screen, with some gain - such as the Carada Brilliant White surface, or one of the screens with 1 to 1.4 gain from the likes of Elite, Da-lite, and others produce.

If you are primarily watching movies, and not worried about really bright for sports and some TV viewing, then you've got a pretty bright projector here, with over 600 lumens in best mode, and you can treat yourself to a pretty large screen. I've mostly been watching movies at about 120" or even a bit larger diagonal, and there's brightness to spare (compared to most).

I use a high contrast gray surface, not even a positive gain white screen. It helps control the black levels, so, if you are more performance orientented in this regard, try a high contrast gray surface.

If dealing with some ambient light, and you like sports, etc (not cave style), the HD71 might be the better choice, being brighter still, but if the HD65 appeals to you, I'd say go with those plus gain screens, but limit the size to 120" diagonal maximum, or a little less.

HD65 Projector Measurements and Calibration

OK, from the top:

There are three color temperature modes - Warm, Medium, and Cool were measured, at 100 IRE (white), for three of the four main modes:

Temperature Modes
Cinema 5177 (Warm) 6020 (Medium) 6570 (Cold)
Bright 6092 (Warm) 6774 (Cold)
Photo 5967 (Medium) 6660 (Cold)
TV 6505 (No temp choices available)
Temperature Measurements
100IRE 6570K
80 IRE 6650K
50 IRE 6505K
30 IRE 6505K

As you can see above, the Cold setting looks best for hitting the ideal 6500K target (actually 6480K is technically corrected but most people just refer to 6500K).

After adjustment, these were the final temperature measurements:

Header Content
User Mode Bright Mode
Contrast -4 -4
Brightness 2 0
Gain R=5 R=5
G = 0 G = 0
B = 2 B = -2
Bias R = -3 R = -1
G = 0 G = 0
B = 0 B = 0

That's about as good as it gets with all temperatures in a tight 165K range.

To get those numbers, these ended up as our User defined settings:

You may want to try out these settings and compare them to the defaults (cold color temp) for Bright Mode. As mentioned elsewhere, these Bright Mode settings produce a really good image, you will find that the default though is over 50% brighter. Many will favor leaving bright mode pretty much at the default settings, to enjoy the extra horsepower.

Thanks to Mike's work, we now have an image and some charts, in addition to the numbers above: The main image here, shows the accuracy of the colors, and as you can see not only do the primaries (Red, Green, Blue) look really good, but even the secondaries (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta) look good as well.

You can see here, the square in the center indicating our ideal color temperature. There are also 6 small circles connected by the lines. Those represent the ideal points for each primary and secondary color. The diamond in the center, represents the projector's color temp. The triangles (represent measured results) by each circle, show how close the H65 comes to hitting each target.

Below is a chart showing the primary colors each is within a couple of percent of the ideal 100% for each color (that's not much at all), except down at the low end under 30 IRE where our current equipment isn't accurate.

Overall the results look extremely good, which is equally apparent when watching the fully calibrated Optoma HD65.

HD65 Image Noise

Pretty much the same as the HD71: "Not great, not bad." DLP projectors tend to show more basic image noise than 3LCD projectors, and this Optoma projector is fairly typical in that regard. The good news is, it isn't over the top. I would say, definitely acceptable. Interestingly, Optoma doesn't have any noise filter. We're talking about the basic image noise that you typically only would notice in fairly stationary images in bright areas.

When it comes to motion artifacts, and and some other more "sophisticated" types of noise, the HD65 passes all the noise tests on the Silicon Optix test disc.

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