Optoma HD800XLV review

The HD800XLV is a good-looking projector, with a silver case and the lens assembly poking out of the wedge-shaped front.

It's shallow enough to mount on a shelf, although with the lamp on its bright setting it pumps out hot air from the side. Unfortunately, there isn't any lens shift, so placement is more limited than others here. In addition, it has the lowest throw ratio and the joint-smallest zoom here, so you'll need a big room if you want a large image out of it.

Even at this price, the DLP mechanism couldn't eliminate the rainbow effect. The shimmering effect was more evident on this model than on InFocus's cheaper X9. While contrast was excellent, colour accuracy was not as impressive, with blues looking dull.

We tried tweaking the image quality settings to fix some of these issues, but they're rather thin on the ground. There are standard brightness, contrast and colour settings, but the advanced settings are limited to gamma, colour temperature, noise reduction and edge enhancement. The latter is a crude facsimile of the HQV setting found on ViewSonic's Pro8100, and at higher levels made the image awfully distorted.

The menu system is easy to use, but we found that changing some settings caused the image to flash or disappear for seconds at a time while the changes took effect. This was often accompanied by rattling noises as the lens assembly reset itself. With the lamp on bright mode causing the fan to spin up, the HD800XLV was quite a noisy machine. It also got rather hot, and you'll need to leave it plugged in for a while after turning it off to allow the fan to cool the lamp.

While it's capable of reasonable image quality, the HD800XLV suffers from the standard DLP issues of the rainbow effect and fizzing. For some people, this will make it a non-starter. If you're happy spending £1,500, you should consider stretching an extra £200 to get Sony's HW10. Alternatively, save £250 and buy Mitsubishi's HC5500.