Optoma HD33 review

The four preset picture modes are good starting points, but none of them made our test footage look its best. Thankfully, we could adjust the brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness, as well as Optoma’s Pure Engine, for noise reduction and motion smoothing.

2D footage looked slightly washed out at the default settings, but this was easily fixed with a few tweaks to the colours. Contrast wasn’t as good as we’d expected, particularly in darker scenes, and there was an unmistakable rainbow effect in places. It took some fighting with the manual lens to get images looking sharp: it moves slightly after you let go.

The HD33 doesn’t have an integrated receiver for its active shutter glasses; you have to connect the bundled external wireless emitter to the projector. It’s omnidirectional, unlike other projectors we’ve seen, so the supplied glasses had no trouble picking up a signal. 3D footage jumped off the screen in a way other projectors fail to match and, despite the 1,800-lumen lamp, the image remained bright and there was very little flicker from the lights in our test room.

Optoma’s high-end projectors carry serious gravitas, but the HD33 feels a little too stripped back to reach such a low price. The manual lens adjustment is less precise than we would like and 2D picture quality is nothing special. It’s a fine choice if 3D is your main priority but a better option is Epson’s cheaper EH-TW5900, which has equally immersive 3D but much better 2D image quality.