Optoma HD66

Motion Smoothness (4.75)

We found that the HD66 produced smooth, natural motion, although it did not seem that the projector does any motion processing to smooth this motion.

Motion Artifacting (6.25)

We did see some issues with fast-moving objects, with some obvious color fringing around bright objects moving rapidly. Called the “rainbow effect”, this is caused by the way that DLP projectors like this work. The different colors that form the image are created by a spinning filter ring, which has red, green, blue and white sections. So, the image you see is really a sequence of different colored ones, but they are shown so quickly the eye combines them into one. However, if an object is moving rapidly on screen, it can move imbetween the different color frames, producing a slight color fringe. With a fast moving object, the eye sees this as a rainbow.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps

The HD66 can display images at a frequency of up to 120Hz, or 120 images a second. However, it (and most projectors) do not support the 3:2 motion pulldown processing (also called inverse telecine) that many broadcasters use to give their TV shows a more film-like look. The HD66 is able to display a 24 frames per second signal generated by many high-end Blu-ray players.

Resolution scaling (7.00)

The HD66 is a 720p projector, with a native resolution of 1280 by 720 pixels. However, it can accept and scale signals at other resolutions, ranging from VGA and standard definition right up to 1080p. To test how well it does with these, we use a number of test screens to examine how well it scales these images.

480p
These relatively low resolution images are upscaled by the projector to fit most of the screen. As a consequence, they do look rather blocky, but the details of the image are well reproduced.

720p
The HD66 is a 720p projector, so it is no surprise that it does a good job of displaying a 720p signal: the results were clear and sharp.

1080i & 1080p
The HD66 can’t show every pixel of a 1080 video signal because it has a lower resolution. So, it downscales the image to the same size as a 720p image, reducing the 1920 by 1080 pixels of the image to fit the 1200 by 760 pixels of the display. This downscaling gives images a somewhat soft appearance and looses some details. We also did not see any difference between feeding the projector a 1080i (with 30 interlaced frames a second) image or a 1080p one, which contains 60 full frames a second.

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