Optoma HD37 Home Projector Review - Performance

A quick look at the numbers in the chart, and you notice a few things.  Other than switching Bright mode to Native lamp color temp, all the modes are within 150 lumens of each other - less than 15% variation, which is slight.

Also there are three groups of modes in terms of brightness.  If you look at Vivid and User mode, they are essentially identical, indicating that when Mike did his measurements before calibration, User was based on Vivid mode, as they share near identical numbers.  User takes on the life of the last mode where you modified settings.

Calibrated:  Optoma HD37 - Best Mode:  1475 lumens

Need more lumens?  Well, of course we quote mid-zoom.  At full wide angle, you get 1637 lumens - roughly 10% more, not enough for anything but a just noticeable difference.  Setting the Color Gamut to Native gives colors a lot more punch - might help a lot with ambient light, but it doesn't measure significant extra lumens.  BTW, With Mike's calibration settings Color saturation is set for 24.  If you switch to Native, that will drop to something like -6.

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Going from adjusting the projector's lens for the closest distance possible for your screen size, to the furthest position (50% further back), results in a loss of about 25% of brightness.  So that's your brightness penalty if you choose to place the projector as far back as it can go to fill your screen.

Merely going from wide angle to mid-point on the zoom, however results in a modest drop of 10%!  These are fairly typical differences for a 1.5:1 zoom in home entertainment and moderately priced home theater projectors.

Once again Mike measured using Bright mode.  He found Eco mode dropped brightness down about 24% from full lamp mode.  That amount of drop (give or take minor measuring error) should remain the same no matter which color mode you were to measure.

Eco mode, of course reduces your electric bill, brightness, and also fan noise.