Optoma HD141X Projector Review – Special Features 2

Digital Zoom

With Digital Zoom (a menu item), you can reduce the size of the whole image by up to 20%, which might come in handy if you can’t properly place the projector and it’s overshooting your screen.

Or you can zoom in up to 2X so that you’ve doubled the size of one area of the screen.  You can move around to select the portion of the image that you wish to view.

Brilliant Color

Consider Brilliant Color to be a feature set that affects picture quality.  It is actually, to the best of my understanding, part of the chipset that Texas Instruments provides to manufacturers (TI makes the DLP chips).  Some projectors have a simple On/Off for Brilliant Color, others like the Optoma HD141X, offer a number of settings typical is 5 to 10 settings to choose from.

The more Brilliant Color you use, typically the brighter, and more pumped up the image.  In other words using Brilliant Color can result in a very dynamic looking image, but with that, the picture can often be over the top.  For that same reason, the Brilliant Color setting for the HD141X’s Cinema mode is a low 2, while Vivid is 9.   You get the idea.  Vivid is “over the top” but that’ some of what you want when fighting too much ambient light.

In olden days Brilliant Color was often combined with poor grayscale balance, but in recent years, Mike reports when calibrating that typically Brilliant Color On now starts with a better grayscale balance than with it off.   A lot of Brilliant Color = a whole lot of “pop” to the image.

Edge Masking

Some projectors offer Overscan, fewer offer Edge Masking, and even less offer both controls.

Both are suitable for eliminating image noise around the edge of the picture.  You might find some of the from cable / satellite images, but you are far more likely to find it with low def, rather than HDTV.

With Edge masking, the projector simply turns off the pixels at the outer edge perhaps the outermost 1 or 5 or 10 pixels all the way around the image.  You therefore end up with a slightly smaller image that no longer fills your screen, but you maintain 1:1 pixel mapping for maximum sharpness.  Overscan instead, also doesn’t show the data at the outer edge, but does it by expanding the rest of the image. This means no more 1:1 so you get a softer image (as you would with keystone correction).  In other words, I prefer edge masking.

HDMI-Link

The HD141X’s HDMI-Link means that the projector – or rather its remote control can be used to control other HDMI-link compatible devices.  Those might include Blu-ray players and some cable / satellite boxes.

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