Optoma HD8300

You don't have to look any further than the $4,499 list price to know that the Optoma HD8300 is aimed at serious videophiles rather than typical consumers. In fact, it's sold primarily by the sort of custom dealer who will normally install and calibrate the projector for you, if not build your entire home theater. If that's the class of projector you're looking for, the HD8300 is easily up to job, with great-looking images in both 2D and 3D at up to 1080p resolution.

Not too surprisingly, the HD8300 shares some important features with the Optoma HD33 ($1,500, 4 stars) that I recently reviewed. In particular it offers a similar frame interpolation feature to eliminate judder—the slightly jerky motion that's built into filmed content because of the standard 24 frame per second speed for film. It also shares the HD33's 3D support for both DLP-link glass and RF glasses, which are currently less common.

As with the HD33, the HD8300's DLP-Link support is built into the projector. The RF support uses an external RF emitter that comes with the projector and plugs into its VESA 3D port. The advantage for RF glasses is that you don't have to maintain a line of sight connection to keep the glasses synched for 3D, which means you won't lose sync if you look away from the screen for a moment. Note too that the projector doesn't come with any glasses, so whichever kind you want, you'll have to buy them separately, at $100 each for the rechargeable Optoma models.

Because it's worth it
Of course, at roughly three times the price, you would expect the HD8300 to deliver some significant advantages over the HD33 as well, and it does. Among other features, it offers a 1.5x manual zoom to give you far more flexibility in how far you can put the projector from the screen for a given size image. It also offers both vertical and horizontal lens shift, so you can shift the image up, down, left, and right without moving the projector.

Optoma says the vertical shift is plus or minus 65% from the midpoint, and the horizontal shift is less than plus or minus 10% from the midpoint. That's less than with some other projectors, like the somewhat less expensive Sony VPL-HW30ES ($3,700 street, 4 stars) or the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 8350 ($1299 direct, 4 stars), for example, but it's enough to be helpful.

A much more important advantage for the HD8300 over the HD33 is that it has still less of a rainbow effect. Rainbow artifacts, with light areas breaking up into little red-green-blue rainbows, are a potential issue for any single-chip DLP projector, because of the way the technology creates colors, showing each primary color in sequence, rather that showing them all at once.

When I reviewed the HD33, I pointed out that I saw rainbow artifacts with it less often than with most DLP projectors. I saw them even less often with the HD8300. I'd still rather have a projector that doesn't show rainbow artifacts at all, but unless you—or someone you regularly watch with—are extremely sensitive to seeing the rainbow effect (as I am), you probably won't see them with the HD8300.

Setup and Brightness
Setup isn't much of an issue, given that the dealer is likely to be doing it for you. Even so, it's worth knowing that this is a relatively big projector, at 7.6 by 14.6 by 19.3 inches (HWD), and it offers a fairly typical set of connectors, including two HDMI ports for video sources or a computer, a VGA port for a computer or component video, three phono plugs for component video, and a composite video port. As is common with home theater projectors, there are no audio ports, and no audio system.

Optoma rates the projector in its brightest mode at 1,500 lumens. That would make it far too bright for the size screen you're most likely to have in the projector's natural home, which is a traditional home theater setup with theater-dark lighting. With that in mind, the default lamp setting uses the lowest brightness for the lamp, which Optoma calls the standard setting. And, as is typical with projectors, the Cinema mode setting is noticeably dimmer than the brightest mode.

With these default settings, the projector offers the appropriate brightness for the 78-inch wide image (90-inch diagonal at 1080p) that we generally use for testing. For a larger screen, or for a room with ambient light, you can switch to a brighter setting.

Our 2D tests include both DVDs upscaled to 1080p and Blu-ray discs. The HD8300 showed just a hint of posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually) in one scene that many projectors have problems with, but if I weren't looking for it, I might not have noticed. In every other scene, and in every other way, the image quality was excellent. The projector did a good job with color, skin tones, shadow detail (maintaining details based on shading in dark areas), and maintaining details in bright areas. I also saw little to no noise.

As I already noted, the projector scored remarkably better than most DLP projectors for rainbow artifacts. I saw them in black and white footage in night scenes, but hardly at all otherwise. It's unlikely that even those who are sensitive to seeing the artifacts will find them objectionable.

Optoma's PureMotion feature, the frame interpolation that I mentioned earlier, worked as promised to remove judder. As with the same feature in the HD33 and the equivalent MotionFlow feature in the Sony VPL-HW30ES, however, it also adds artifacts in its highest setting that I find distracting. I found the lowest setting in all three projectors to be the best compromise, and I found the low setting in the two Optoma projectors more watchable than the low setting for the VPL-HW30ES. However, this is a matter of personal taste, and you may feel differently.

You may even want to turn the feature off altogether. Adding the interpolated frames gives movies much the same look and feel as live video. Some people, including me, find that the improvement just doesn't look right, a reaction that can make it hard to ignore how the image looks and simply watch the movie.

The HD8300 also did well on 3D tests. It offers HDMI 1.4a ports so you can show 3D from a Blu-ray player, cable, FIOS, or equivalent source without needing a video converter. More important, with both 3D Blu-ray discs and a direct connection to FIOS, the HD8300 delivered good image quality and I saw only an occasional hint of crosstalk (the blurriness, or ghost image, that shows when the frame meant for one eye leaks through to the other eye as well.)

Ultimately, the Optoma HD8300 gets high marks and an enthusiastic recommendation, but with an important hedge. If you see rainbow artifacts easily, you might find them all the more annoying after spending this much on a projector. In that case, you might prefer an alternative, like the Sony VPL-HW30ES, which is based on a technology that can't show rainbow artifacts. But for those who aren't sensitive to the effect, or don't mind seeing an occasional rainbow, the enthusiastic recommendation stands.