- Can we kill the filming lights
for just a short period so I can try it out?
Dang.
There's nothing quite
like a giant projector screen, is there?
This doesn't look like very gamery packaging.
But with a lightning-fast 240 Hertz refresh rate,
15.7 milliseconds of input lag and HDR support,
with up to a 120 inch screen,
this projector sounds too good to be true.
But Optoma says it is true.
They claim that their UHD30 is designed from the ground up
for all gaming and delivers an unmatched gaming experience.
But can it possibly get even close
to what you would experience from a TV
or even just a really big monitor?
Can you actually get a convincing HDR gaming experience
from a $1,300 DLP projector?
What corners had to be cut
to manage a 240 Hertz refresh rate?
Is this gonna turn into one of those
like nonsense debunking beep manufacturer save videos?
Why hasn't Linus told us about the sponsor yet?
Soundcore has released its latest wireless earbuds.
The Liberty Air 2 Pros.
They feature clear audio
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Learn more at the end of the video
or at the link in the video description.
(bright music)
The UHD30 isn't the first gaming-focused projector
and in fact it's not even the only 240 Hertz model
on the market.
It just happens to be the only one that's priced
within reach of consumers.
And compared to past gaining projectors that focused
on the stereoscopic 3D experience,
the UHD30's list of specs is more relevant
to today's discerning gamer,
including the standout features
we want to investigate today.
240 Hertz refresh rate at 1080p
and a claimed 15.7 milliseconds of input lag.
Obviously, neither of these numbers are on par
with the best gaming monitors today.
But in the projector world where it's common to see
80 milliseconds of lag, this is a potential game-changer.
(laughing loudly)
Optoma claims this unit can project an image
up to 300 inches diagonally,
but you're gonna start losing brightness
and contrast, pretty hardcore,
not to mention that you would need
an absolutely massive room
for that to make any sense whatsoever.
I mean, the image alone would be over 12 feet tall
and 22 feet wide.
Also, this is not a short-throw projector
so we settled on a 100 inch image,
which already requires at least 11 feet
between the projector lens and the surface of our screen.
If we wanted to go 300 inches,
we need to back it right up.
Now it's time for some gaming.
And before you say it,
"Yes we know what 12 foot roll of seamless white paper
isn't gonna give us the performance,"
but it will be better than the painted walls
that we have here.
So for a real setup, you should always leave room
in your budget for a proper screen.
Hey, wait a minute, what is this?
Nicholas?
You couldn't be arse
to fix the trapezoid shape of the image.
The problem is, Nicholas did notice this problem
and did try to fix it.
It's Optima who didn't feel
that it was right worth mentioning on the product page.
Let's play around with the settings a bit, shall we?
Oh, enhanced gaming.
Well, we definitely want enhanced gaming, don't we?
The enhanced gaming mode dramatically lowers the input lag
but it does come at a cost.
Once you've enabled it,
you can see here that our image is in fact square now
but that's only because our projector happens to be sitting
in exactly the right position.
When you turn on enhanced gaming,
which you need for that low input leg,
keystone adjustments cannot be made.
So if we wanted to mount our projector up by the ceiling
and have our screen down closer to our couch level,
we would simply not be able to do that
without experiencing some kind of distortion of the image.
It's probably worth mentioning
that if you don't care about input lag,
it does have 40 degrees of keystone correction
but it's vertical only not horizontal.
I'm gonna grab this lttstore.com CPU pillow.
Oh yeah.
Get comfortable and assume that I am some kind
of genius Whizkid projector mounting master,
and that we can get it configured right
without relying on keystone
and actually play some freaking games.
I thought maybe we were plugged into the HDMI 1.4 port
so only one of them is HDMI 2.0, which you'll need
for 240 Hertz, 1080p.
After a little bit of tinkering,
we've got it running at 1080p, 240 Hertz with HDR.
Turns out there's a bit of weirdness where games will think
that the projector's default resolution is 1920 by 1200
which is not supported at 240 Hertz.
So it can get a little confused.
That feels pretty darn responsive.
And HDR makes a big difference on a projector actually.
I'm pretty impressed by how black black is around the edges.
Like a lot of the time you can end up with black looking
just kind of gray 'cause there's not enough contrast.
Overall, this game is a little dark right now for me though.
Wow, that really does feel pretty darn good.
I'm definitely noticing, though,
that at a comfortable distance for the size of this image,
I am seated right next to the freaking projector
which has kind of an annoying fan in it.
And also I'm not able to sit dead center
in front of the screen because I would block it.
Not having any keystone adjustment, definitely an oversight
but I can't fault the responsiveness.
Like that feels really good and you know what?
I don't even notice any rainbow effect.
For those who aren't familiar,
the rainbow effect is a phenomenon where
as your eyes move around to look at different parts
of the image or as objects move around on the screen,
you can see a kind of weird rainbowy fringing
at the edges that is, can be quite distracting
for some people and impossible to notice for others.
I'm reasonably sensitive to it and what it basically means
if we don't see it here, is that the mirrors
are moving so fast that they're able to go all the way
from one state to another
without seeing those weird artifacts in between.
While we were switching over to 60 Hertz 4K
we noticed another interesting disadvantage of gaming mode.
4K looks like absolutely dog crap.
Text looks, I would describe as pretty all right.
We turned enhanced gaming mode on
and honestly it looks as bad as 1080p
or maybe even a little worse than what I would expect.
Do you see that?
It's pretty bad.
This isn't the kind of thing that I would notice in-game
but on the desktop, it's pretty jarring.
Like these hanging objects here,
normally if we were at 1080P,
I would definitely see stair-stepping and aliasing on them,
but it's like 4K but...
Like here, let's bring up some texts again.
This text looks fine, but it's really, really big text.
Yeah, and you'll see this looks crappy.
Weird, huh?
Could we kill the filming lights
for just a short period so I can try it out?
Dang.
This looks freaking awesome now.
I could get used to this.
And in terms of input lag, not bad.
We're only running at 60 Hertz now though.
Like it's clearly not up there
with the best gaming monitors, but it's fine.
There's nothing quite
like a giant projector screen, is there?
Now that we've experienced it,
let's talk about how this even works.
How is Optoma getting 240 Hertz out of a projector?
How do DLP projectors even work?
Well, at the core of every DLP projector,
there's a lamp module and the light output
is then passed through a spinning color wheel.
In this case, it's an eight-segment RGBWRGBW wheel.
This creates a rapid repeating sequence
of red, green, blue, white, red, green, blue, white light.
Speaking of RGB and projectors by the way,
we have a video with a sweet laser projector
that we're gonna be trying out.
Be sure you're subscribed for that.
Just for some clarity,
the white cell is actually just clear.
This allows for a brighter overall picture.
The light sequence is then reflected
off of the digital micro mirror device,
or DMD through the lens
and then onto a background of your choice.
The DMD chip in the UHD30
has an array of mirrors that sit on a hinge
with each mirror being a pixel
and the mirrors arranged in a 1920 by 1080 grid.
These mirrors are digitally controlled,
switching on and off in around one microsecond,
flipping them from either reflecting light
through the lens or reflecting light away from the lens.
For reference, by the way, a single frame at 240 Hertz
is about 4,100 microseconds.
So these things are moving real fast.
To get a 4K picture, The DMD panel itself
is actually shifted physically four times per frame.
So you're literally creating four entire 1080p frames
per real frame and then stitching them all together
to make a single 4K frame.
Now, if you're willing to accept the additional input lag
that we saw, it actually works really well.
It's also conveniently how we get 240 Hertz
out of this projector.
Instead of a single 4K 60 image,
they stop the pixel shifting
and just give us the 1080p signal 240 times a second.
60 x 4240, right?
Quick math.
Now, there's another thing that we wanted to try.
And we obviously saw that in a completely dark room,
the performance is way better.
But Optoma does have a bright mode.
It only gives you 4,000 hours of lamp life
but I do kind of wanna know if it's any good.
Oh, we actually don't know how to enable it.
Well, nevermind, we won't be trying it
because you have to go out of HDR mode in order to use that.
So that's pretty dumb.
One of the other good things about the UHD30
over previous generations of DLP projectors though
is its ability to tilt the mirrors plus or minus 17 degrees,
which is 40% more compared to the last generation.
This improves contrast because it lets the mirrors
redirect light away from the lens more effectively.
Of course, we're gonna wanna see how that goes
so let's do a quick contrast measurement.
We've got 0.35 lumens on one of our black squares
and 23.9 on one of our white square.
What does that work out to?
It's about eight?
That doesn't seem right.
Is the rated contrast ratio at like a millimeter
from the lens or what?
'Cause I get 776 there.
Okay, I think it's not broken.
We know that our testing environment isn't perfect for this
but the reality of it is, nothing in the real world is
because even if you have a completely lightless room,
you're still gonna have light from the bright parts
of your scene on the projector screen bouncing around in it.
And it's pretty clear from what we measured
that this thing is not even close
to the advertised contrast ratio.
The good news is that it still looks pretty darn good
if you're in a dark room,
the bad news is that projector manufacturers
really need to stop making up meaningless numbers
to describe their products.
Because Optoma says that this has
a 500,000:1 contrast ratio.
Get freaking real.
The conclusion is the same as it usually is.
If you don't have complete light control,
maybe a big fat Vizio TV is a better choice
because performance will be better
and the cost won't be too far off,
especially once you factor in
the price of a projector screen.
If you need keystone, this thing is completely out.
But if you don't need keystone,
is this the projector for gaming?
I mean, as long as you're under optimal, get it?
'Cause Optoma.
Optimal conditions, yeah, it's pretty sweet
even if they oversell it a fair bit.
Just like I'm gonna oversell you our sponsor.
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A huge shout out by the way, to Rob over at avrant.com
for answering some questions we had.
We don't cover projectors all the time.
We're gonna have that site linked down below
if you guys wanna learn more
and if you liked this video,
hey maybe check out how I turned my garage
into a home theater on a budget.
Pretty sweet.