Optoma HD8000 and HD80 DLP Home Theater Projector Review – General Performance-16

Posted on October 15, 2009 By Art Feierman

Optoma HD8000 Projector Screen Recommendations

For most people I think that a white screen with modest gain (1.1 to 1.4 gain) is probably ideal. Of course if you have side ambient light, a nice high contrast gray surface can really help a lot, but if ambient light isn’t your problem, then this should be pretty straightforward.

For seasoned videophiles who want to really darken the blacks, the high contrast gray surface like my Firehawk works great, as well. My point is, that the black levels are sufficient to satisfy the vast majority, without needing a gray surface.

I also usually point out that if you are going with a smaller screen (under 100″ diagonal), then you might find a projector to be a bit too bright. That however is not a possibility with the HD80 and HD8000 projectors. The adjustable manual iris will easily allow one to darken the image significantly. I didn’t measure, but I suspect that you can combine low power lamp mode, and the iris to come up with less than 200 lumens, if you had to.

I’d like to mention that there are some new screens “optimized” for 1080p projectors. Basically they have a finer surface structure. My new Firehawk G3 is one of them, and I can see the difference (slight), between it, and my older Firehawk, in that regard. I imagine we’ll be seeing more “1080p” resolution screens in the future, so keep an eye out for them.

Optoma HD8000 Calibration


100IRE	7390K
80IRE	6748K
50IRE	6901K
30IRE	6389K

To get a significantly improved color balance, here are the settings I came up with:

Set the Color Temp to User:
The numbers in ( ) are the default numbers

Gain: Red (100) 100, Green (100) 84, Blue (100) 79
Offset: Red (128) 128, Green (128) 128, Blue (128) 127


100IRE	6563K
80IRE	6764K
50IRE	6869K
30IRE	6443K

And with it, the heavy shift to green and blue is gone and skin tones look really good.

Here are the color temperatures for white (100 IRE) for the other settings. I didn’t adjust any others (as I had one great for movies):

Bright mode: 7844K
TV mode: 9396K

OK, that’s it. I’m sure a professional calibrator can manage to at least match my improvements to grayscale, and probably do so without giving up as many lumens as I did. For those of you who don’t go the calibration route, let me remind you that there will be variance from projector to projector, most notably with the lamps. So don’t expect my settings above to perform exactly the same on your projector. Still, they should get you much closer to a great image than the projector will offer out of the bo

Optoma HD8000 Image Noise

Optoma uses Gennum processing on their higher end HD81 and HD81-LV projectors, but I believe that the HD80 and HD8000 projectors are using image processing from Pixelworks. Overall image noise performance is perfectly acceptable, using the HQV test disk. The Optoma did well on all the standard jaggie and standard motion artifacts tests. There is some slight background image noise, but at levels typical of DLP projectors. I do not run the many different cadence tests.

Time for a quick look at the Warranty, then the Summary section!