Optoma ThemeScene HD70 review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 15 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: inc. VAT

Reviewed By: Lynley Oram

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Optoma's ThemeScene HD70 stands out, if only because it's white.

This might suit some rooms, but it's unlikely to match many other pieces of home cinema equipment. When we first turned on the HD70, the sky on the Windows desktop background looked green instead of blue. We also had to adjust the brightness and contrast. No other projector here required so much adjustment straight from the box in order to get a decent picture.

Even after adjustment, colours were rich but a little oversaturated. This had an odd effect on light colours such as yellow, which were so bright that they appeared to glow in still images. Like the other DLP projectors, reds had a slightly brownish appearance. Skin tones were a little yellow. The HD70 did well at picking out detail in dark areas, though, and our HD clips were sharp and vividly reproduced. It displayed a perfect Windows desktop when connected to our computer via its HDMI input, but when using VGA we couldn't get an acceptable 1,280x720 image.

The HD70 uses a 7-segment colour wheel and suffers from very little rainbow effect. It also has the highest contrast ratio of the DLP models.

For only £680 the Optoma will let you display 720p video. Unfortunately its colour accuracy leaves much to be desired, and it's not good when connected to a computer via VGA. Unless your budget is extremely tight, we recommend the slightly more expensive Hitachi.

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