Optoma HD806 Projector Calibration and Settings

Posted on December 15, 2008 by Art Feierman

We calibrate each home theater that is reviewed. It is a pretty standard calibration, there's always more that can be done by some of the "hi-end" calibrators.

Optoma HD806 Color Temperature


30 IRE	6412
50 IRE	6503
80 IRE	6528
100 IRE	6465

First, here are the color temperture measurements for the Cinema mode, right out of the box

Very good, but they can be improved a bit.

Optoma HD806 Basic Settings

Our final settings (numbers in parens are the default numbers):
Contrast:
Cinema	45 (44)
Bright	42 (46)
TV	43 (45)
sRGB	44 (45)
User	46 (50)
Brightness:
Cinema	44 (43)
Bright	44 (44)
TV	46 (45)
sRGB	45 (44)
User	45 (44)
Color:
Cinema	(47)
Bright	(54)
TV	60)
sRGB (52) User	(50)
Tint	(50)
adjusted for User mode to 47

In addition to calibrating Red Green and Blue for a correct grayscale balance (6500K), there are a number of other settings that come into play. Typically Contrast and Brightness (white balance and black balance), need to be done first. Color saturation and gamma also need adjustment.

Mike did not adjust saturation.

All other settings are at their defaults for those modes.
Zoom was set at mid-range, All other settings at default

Optoma HD806 Post Calibration Grayscale

Pure Cinema Mode:
White (100 IRE)	6752K
Light gray (80 IRE)	6553K
Medium gray (50 IRE)	6609K
Dark gray (30 IRE)	6489K

The HD806 produced good post calibration results, with a resulting good picture, but this Optoma does not calibrate particularly well, and most other projectors can produce output consistently closer to the ideal 6500K. That said, the picture color is very good, and very watchable. Here are the measurements after calibration, for Pure Cinema Mode:

Gamma measured to 2.28, pretty close to the ideal 2.2 for movie watching. We did not measure different degamma's (Film, Video, etc.) Video, however nicely lowers the gamma to give a big more brightness to the mid and darker areas for better TV and sports type viewing.