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

Overall the HD8000 Menus are fairly logically though out, although there are a lot of levels for some of the advanced features. For example – from the main menu system, switching lamp brightness or controlling Iris settings are two levels down, three if you count the top Main menu.

Let’s take a look. Note: The menus of the HD8000 are very similar to the HD81 and HD81-LV projectors we’ve reviewed already. There should be a couple of differences between the HD8000 and the HD80, however if you want to find those differences, you’ll probably have to look up the user manual on the Optoma site.

Pressing the Menu button on the remote or the one the Optoma projector’s control panel, you will see the menu to the right; the Image Menu. On the left side, you can see the three other primary menus as well: Display, System, and Setup.

The Mode gives you the choice of 3 User presets. All are slightly different. I used User 1 as the basis for most of my work. In addition the Mode lets you select from ISF Day, and ISF Night, if you have had your projector professionally calibrated, giving you a total of five sets of settings. I suspect that the HD80 will not show the ISF Day and Night settings, as it is not ISF certified.

After that, there are the usual basic image controls, like brightness and contrast. Unfortunately if you scroll down, to, say, Brightness, you then have to Enter or right arrow key which will then bring up your ability to adjust Brightness. It would be nicer if once on Brightness, the left and right arrow keys simply let you change the value, instead of essentially opening another window, and adding several extra keystrokes.