Optoma HD66

Throw (1.60)

All projectors have a distance (or range of distances) across which they can project (or “throw”) an image. This is important as it determines where the projector has to be mounted: If a projector has a small throw distance, it has be mounted close to the screen. If it has a long throw distance, you might not have room to provide the throw distance it required. Most projectors include a zoom lens that allows for some flexibility here, but the HD66 doesn’t give you much flexibility: the 1.1x zoom lens only provides a range of a few inches either way in how far away from the screen it has to be placed to fit a particular size.

	Optoma HD66 Required Distance for Screen Size
	64-inch screen	80-inch screen	100-inch screen	120-inch screen	140-inch screen
Wide Angle	7ft 2in	8ft 11in	11ft 2in	13ft 5in	15ft 8in
Telephoto	7ft 9in	9ft 8in	12ft 1in	14ft 6in	16ft 11in

Screen Brightness

The bigger the screen, the larger the screen area, and the dimmer the image will be from a projector. Below are the lux levels that this projector will produce in the brightest mode (the appropriately named Bright) with a number of different screen sizes, ranging from a 64 inch to a monster 140 inch screen. Below that are our recommendations for the maximum size of screen that this projector can be used with in a variety of lighting situations. The bottom line is that this projector would work well for all of the sizes in a dark room (such as a dark living room or media room), but it isn’t suitable to drive anything bigger than 80 inches in a room that has anything more than dim light in it.

	Optoma HD66 Projector brightness
64-inch screen	1892 lux
80-inch screen	1211 lux
100-inch screen	775 lux
120-inch screen	538 lux
140-inch screen	395 lux

Most people don’t watch movies or presentations in dark rooms, so a projector has to try and overcome the ambient light. We test this by photographing the projector running in the brightest mode showing a test screen at a number of different ambient light levels: a darkened room (about 10 lux), a dimly lit room (about 150 lux), a moderately well lit room (about 500 lux) and a typical office or conference room (about 1500 lux). As you can see from the photos below, the HD66 running in the Bright mode looked great in the darker light conditions, but struggled somewhat when there was more ambient light; the images look pale and washed out.

	Ambient Light Performance Comparisons
	Optoma HD66	ViewSonic PJD6531w	Epson Home Cinema 705HD	Canon LV-8310
Darkened Room (10 lux)
Dimly Lit Room (15 lux)
Moderate Lighting (500 lux)
Bright Lighting (1500 lux)

Screen Materials

Our test screen is a dedicated projection screen, but you don’t always get that luxury: sometimes, you have to use whatever projection surface you can find. So, we test the performance of projectors with 4 surfaces: a white painted white wall, a cream painted wall, wood paneling and a glossy whiteboard. The HD66 did a decent job on most of these, but the wood panel does not look particularly good: the lack of lumen output means that the image looks pale.The HD66 includes two display modes designed to help with showing images on blackboards (although Optoma suggests this mode “should be selected to achieve optimum color settings when projecting onto a blackboard (green)”. The only other feature that might help is a tint control that allows some color shift to be applied.

Optical Issues (9.00)

We found that the lens of the HD66 provided good performance, with the entire image staying in focus. We also found little evidence of any distortion or other issues: the image has clean, sharp edges and there was no evidence of pinchushioning or barrel distortion, even with keystone correction applied.

The HD66 provides a manual keystone control, which can be used to straighten the edges of the image of the projector is mounted above or below the screen. This can be used to compensate for an angle of up to 40 degrees in either direction, which provides a good level of flexibility for mounting the projector above or below the screen. This did introduce some slight issues with straight edges becoming stair-stepped, though, so the projector should be placed as close to the screen edge as possible.

Image Sharpness

Video Processing (3.00)

The HD66 offers a small selection of video processing features designed to improve image quality. We found that few of these made any real impact on the quality: our conclusions are below.

Setting	Claimed Function	Our Impression
BrilliantColor	utilizes a new color-processing algorithm and system level enhancements to enable higher brightness while providing true, more vibrant colors in picture	Boosts the screen brightness significantly, but has an adverse effect on color accuracy, producing oversaturation. Fine to use for presentations, but should not be used when watching movies or TV.
Degamma	Allows you to choose a degamma table that has been fine-tuned to bring out the best image quality for the input.	Film Degamma mode produces a smooth color response, but other settings introduce banding issues and adversely affect image quality.

Formats

The HD66 is a 720p projector, which means that it has a resolution of 1200 by 800 pixels. This means that it can display video signals at up to 720p resolution at their full resolution, but anything higher than that is scaled down to fit the resolution the projector works at. We found that it did an effective job of this, though: signals like the 1080i and 1080p ones produced by devices such as Blu-ray players and HD cable boxes looked sharp and clear.

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