Optoma HD66

Peak Brightness (9.78)

The HD66 is is a pretty bright projector in its default mode: we found that it could produce a maximum of 2706 lumens showing an all-white screen in the appropriately named Bright mode, actually a little higher than the claimed 2500 lumens. The presentation mode was nearly as bright, outputting around 1865 lumens.

With our calibrated settings, we found that this projector was significantly dimmer: we measured the power of the projector at about 800 lumens. That’s somewhat lower because we disabled some settings that push the brightness (such as the BrilliantColor processing) at the cost of color accuracy and overall performance: our calibrated settings are aimed at uses such as movie watching where overall performance is more important than brightness.

If you want the projector to run cooler and quieter (and to thus extend the lifespan of the lamp), you can set the lamp brightness mode to STD (aka standard; the projector defaults to Bright). Doing this reduced the lumens the projector could produce to about 2000 in the default Bright mode.

On our test projection screen (which is 80 inches across), this translated into a screen brightness of approximately 580 cd/m2 in the Bright mode, and 346 cd/m2 in the movie mode. That makes it about as bright as a conventional TV (although you should remember that the white screen makes it much more vulnerable to ambient light). See the Viewing Effects section of this review for more information on the relationship between the screen size and brightness.

Peak Brightness

Tunnel Contrast (3.90)

To measure how well the projector can separate the blacks and the whites on screen, we measure something called the tunnel contrast. This is a measure of how black the center of the screen remains when it is surrounded by more and more white, ranging from 90 per cent of the screen being black to just 5 per cent. If a projector has problems with light bouncing around inside the projection mechanism, this black area will get lighter. The HD66 didn’t have too much of an issue here: we saw some rise in the black level, but it remained pretty low, indicating no major issues here.

Tunnel Contrast

Uniformity (8.25)

The HD66 had good uniformity in our tests: we found that both black and white screens looked smooth and clear of imperfections. Like all projectors, the lux level across the screen (shown below) does vary, though, depending on where the projector is mounted (in the example below, it was on a table). We did find that the left side of the screen on our rest unit was a little dimmer than the left, which you can see in the photo of the screen below the chart. However, this slight difference was not really noticeable in everyday use: the photos below have been processed slightly to show the differences.

Uniformity

White Screen	Black Screen

Greyscale Gamma (8.28)

In our calibrated mode, we measured the greyscale gamma of this display at 2.49. That’s a little higher than the ideal 2.1 to 2.2 range, but it is not enough to be problematic.

Greyscale Gamma

Read Reviews of Comparison Products
ViewSonic PJD6531w	Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 705HD	Canon LV-8310