Hi Everyone. This is going to be a quick review of two projectors. One being the Optoma GT1080 and the BenQ HT1085ST.
I originally bought the BenQ just because of reviews, mostly, versus the Optoma. People tend
to favor the BenQ projectors. It's been awesome. I like it a lot. I did, however, have an issue
where the keystone settings wouldn't hold. In other words, if I change the keystone settings
it looks fine. If I turn the projector off and turn it back on, it loses the keystone
settings. If you change the setting it will automatically go back to where you had it.
So I ended up calling BenQ and they said they are aware of the issue and that there's a
firmware update for it. But I figured while I was waiting, before I send it off, I would
buy an Optoma GT1080 just to see how it is. Right now what you see projecting this video
is the Optoma. This is the GT1080. As you can see, it's pretty close. It's at about
5 feet right now. This is a 140 inch homemade screen. This is a Carl's Flexiwhite screen
that I made. I built a frame and stretched it out over it and bought Carl's Felt Tape
to go around it. It works pretty well. It doesn't handle ambient light all that well.
Right now there is a light on over here so this is a decent amount of ambient light. The overlay
you see on the screen is coming from the BenQ. I'm going to be switching back and forth so
I have both of them projecting on the screen right now. So just to give you an idea, this
is the GT1080. Let me turn the lights off. So this is how that looks. Again, it's at
about 5 feet. This is a 140 inch 16 x 9 screen. It looks pretty good. I don't have any issues
with it. The flesh tones could be a little bit better. I'm sure it can be optimized and
I haven't tweaked it at all. These are both straight out of the box. The optoma is set
to vivid right now. I've tried Cinema Mode and it does help a lot but it kills a lot
of the actual brightness of the picture. Even though the Optoma does say that it's 2800
lumens versus the 2200 of the BenQ, they appear to have pretty much the same brightness. I
don't notice it at all with the lights on or off. Again, even with the lights on the
Optoma does look a little washed out. Not washed out but the flesh tones look a little
bright. It just looks kind of spotty. From a distance when I'm across the room from about
20 feet away, I do kind of notice some hot spot issues with the Optoma that I don't notice
with the BenQ. I will stand back and you can take a look for yourself. I haven't stood
back yet. Let's try that. Let me turn the lights off again. Again this is the Optoma
that's projecting right now. You'll have to excuse the wires and everything. I'm still building
everything here. But this is just to give you an idea. I haven't really seen too many
videos of the Optoma, especially comparing it to a BenQ projector so I figured it would
be helpful. This is with......I'll turn the lights down to about 50%. So that's half brightness.
It's watchable. Obviously I wouldn't recommend it like this. With the lights dimmed down
very low, it's pretty much perfect. Alright, now I'm going to switch over to the BenQ and
I'm just going to turn the Optoma off so you can get an idea. Just give me one second to
switch this out. Alright. This is the BenQ HT1085ST. As you can see this gives you a
good indication of the throw difference between these two. Down at the bottom here we have
the Optoma and up here we have the BenQ. The BenQ is approximately 9 1/2 to 10 feet back
and the Optoma is about 5 feet back. So it literally cuts the throw distance in half.
So if throw is a big issue and you don't have the space, then obviously you want to end
up going with the Optoma or something else that has a very short throw. I have to say
I'm impressed by both of them. Since this is now the BenQ I'm going to ahead and turn
the lights off so you can see this one. As you can see pretty much right off, the picture
does look a lot more natural when compared to the Optoma. Again, this is out of the box.
If you read reviews, for the most part everyone says that the BenQ looks really good out of
the box. Not to take anything away from Optoma because I'm pretty sure it can be tweaked
to look just as good as this if not close to it. But this looks pretty darn good for
it to just be out of the box and this is on the Standard setting. The lamp is set to standard.
Everything is set to all standard. I haven't made any adjustments at all. Right now the
projector is aimed slightly upwards. There is a bout a 2 inch offset between where the
lens stops and the screen starts. This is about a five to six inch drop from the ceiling.
So it's pretty much fine. It's ideal. The issue I have with the Optoma is that there's
a pretty big vertical lens shift. I am very new to the projectors. These are my first
two projectors so I'm not super familiar with everything about them but basically that means
that if you're on a coffee table and your shooting upwards, the offset is going to be
like......depending on the size of the screen. With my screen it is about a 10 inch offset.
Basically, the bottom of the picture is not going to start until 10 inches above the lens.
Be mindful of that if you want to ceiling mount it. That's another reason why I'm probably
going to end up sending the Optoma back because it won't work for me since my ceiling, considering
the screen is so big and it only starts 6 inches from the top of the ceiling, that won't
work because the offset is so high that I'd need the screen to be way down in order for
that to work without a bunch of keystone and obviously I want to avoid any keystone changes.
With the BenQ, right now as you're looking at it, this is with no keystone changes at
all. So this is a 140 inch screen. This mount.......I forget the company. If I can remember the
company I'll post that in the description. It's about 5 inches from the ceiling. It's
a really good mount. It was only like $25 on Amazon. I like it a lot. It was easy to
put together. It works. It was very versatile. Again, this BenQ is pretty good. I think this
is what I'm going to stick with. I'm probably just going to end up sending it back to BenQ
for them to apply the firmware update. So this is with 50% light power. It actually
does look a tiny bit better than.........actually it looks kind of brighter than the Optoma
did. This is 50% lights. I'll turn the lights all the way up so you can see. Obviously it's
going to be washed out but, again, watchable. Not ideal if you wanted to watch a movie or
anything like that, but it's pretty good. I'll turn the lights back off. But yeah I
don't have any real issues with it. There is as you can see on the ceiling there. There's
like an arch where you can kind of see light spilling from the top. I don't know what that's
all about. It doesn't really bother me that much. Another thing I will say comparing the
BenQ to the Optoma is the noise. I don't know if you can hear it. The BenQ definitely is
a bit louder than the Optoma. It's almost as if the Optoma barely makes any noise at
all compared to the BenQ. That's one thing that people have complained about with a lot
of BenQ projectors, especially the budget ones. That they are a bit noisy. It's nothing
that's going to drive you crazy but being that I don't have any sound on right now,
you can obviously hear it. Overall, I'm very happy with the BenQ. I'm glad to be able to
do this review because I couldn't really find any information comparing the two. Of course
there are a ton of reviews on both of them, with the exception of maybe the HT1085ST because
it's so new but hopefully this helps you out.