could 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 240hz 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 optimus 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 1300 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
manufacturer say 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 and multi-mode active noise cancellation
learn more at the end of the video or at the link in the video description
the uhd30 isn't the first gaming focused projector and in fact it's not even the
only 240hz model on the market it just happens to be the only one that's priced
within reach of consumers and compared to past gaming projectors that focused
on the stereoscopic 3d experience the uhd30s list of specs is more relevant to
today's discerning gamer including the standout features we want to investigate
today 240hz refresh rate at 1080p and
acclaimed 15.7 milliseconds of input lag
now 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
get it optima 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 we wanted to go
300 inches we need to back it right up
oh now it's time for some gaming and before you say it yes we know a 12 foot roll of
seamless white paper isn't going to give us the best performance but it'll be
better than the painted walls that we have here so for a real setup you should
always leave him in your budget for a proper screen
hey wait a minute what is this nicholas
you couldn't be arsed 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 worth mentioning on the
product page let's play around with the settings of it shall we oh enhanced
gaming well we definitely want enhanced gaming don't we the enhanced gaming mode
dramatically lowers the input leg 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 so then i'm gonna grab this
lttstore.com CPU pillow
oh yeah get comfortable and assume that i am
some kind of genius whiz kid 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 240hz 1080p after a little bit of tinkering
we've got it running at 1080p 240hz with HDR turns out there's a bit of weirdness
where games will think that the projector's default resolution is
1920x1200 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 because 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 60hz 4k we
noticed another interesting disadvantage of gaming mode 4k looks like absolute
dog crab text looks i would describe as
pretty all right we turn enhanced gaming mode on and honestly it looks as bad as
1080p or maybe even a little worse than what i would expect
you see that it's pretty i don't know 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 here like these these hanging objects here normally if
we were at 1080p i would i would definitely see stair stepping and
aliasing on them but it's like i don't know it's like 4k but
like here let's bring up some text again i mean yeah this text looks fine but
it's really really big text yeah no 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 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 optima 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 rgbw rgbw 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 going to 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
1920x1080 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 240hz is about 4100 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 leg 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 times for 240 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 optima does have a bright
mode so uh it only gives you 4 000 hours of lamp life but i do kind of want to
know if it's any good oh we actually don't know how to enable
it well never mind we won't be trying it because um
you have to go out of HDR mode in order to uh 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 going to want to see how that goes so let's do a
quick contrast measurement we've got .35 lumens on one of our black
squares and 23.9 on one of our white squares what does that work out too is
that it that doesn't seem right is the rated contrast ratio at like
you know a millimeter from the lens or what because 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 going to
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 optima says that this has a 500 000 to 1 contrast ratio
get freaking real so 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 because optima optimal conditions
yeah it's pretty sweet even if they oversell it a fair bit
just like i'm gonna oversell you our sponsor
soundcore by anchor is featuring the liberty air 2 pros they're wireless
earbuds via bluetooth with multi-mode hybrid active noise cancellation six
mics for ambient noise reduction not to mention clearer calls fast charging with
usb-c or wireless and seven hours of battery life with another 26 hours
provided by the case they're endorsed by 10 grammy winning artists and you can
check them out at the link below 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 so we're going to have that site linked down below if you guys want to
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