I only got round to unpacking it a couple of hours ago and so have done little in the way of setup, however, the story begins ...
Unpack it, set it up on a temporary trolly to get an idea of positioning .. the numbers lead me to believe it'll fit on the shelf below my Sharp Z200E (soon to be sold
)
Plug in the power lead, flick the 'power' switch to '1'
Nothing
Read manual .. could be up to a minute
Wait
Nothing
Read manual
Curse
Unplug known good lead from Sharp, plug into H77
Nothing
Read manual
Curse
Begin to think about sending it back
Curse
Idly fiddle with the remote and for no good reason press the top left button with a red circle round it
POWER!
Read manual .. absolutely NO MENTION of a power button on the remote in the "how to power on" section
At the very least I had expected the blue LED about the power socket to illuminate when power was applied.
So, a quick AVIA for the basics (is it just me or is DVE utterly unfathomable as to where the test sequences are?), slap in "Fellowship of the Ring" to the PC .. magnificent. The Sharp produces a nice picture but at 1024x576 on a 92" screen the pixellation can be a little annoying, the Optoma's extra resolution solves that.
I'm no expert when it comes to evaluating projectors, I can't talk about colour fidelity, blacks and whites, greyscale accuracy etc. etc. .. what I can say is that the opening sequence in "The Two Towers" was an eye-opener.
I've seen comments before from people saying somethingorother "looked more three-dimensional" and for the first time I think I know what they mean. As the camera pans from right to left over the mountain tops in the distance and the peaks in the foreground start to move up from the bottom, I could see a 3-D effect which even the Sharp hadn't delivered, giving a depth to the scene and putting real distance between the various mountain ranges.
This gets even better when the scene cuts to the view going down the mountain-side before it dives into the rock .. the clarity of the ice-field was remarkable, as was the detail in the lake far below.
My only other initial impression is the noise .. or lack of it. As someone already said, this is a bright manchine and 'eco' mode is more than sufficient, at that setting it isn't silent but only emits a gentle whirring of air movement and no hint of colour-wheel whine.
Won't get much playing for the rest of the weekend, I'm hoping to watch FOTR 'as it comes' to get some 'feeling' for it before I do any more fiddling.
Fun.
One thing, can anyone tell me how to discover the firmware version? Nothing in the menus provides that info. In fact, the menu system is pretty un-impressive really, you can't even see the input signal details (resolution and refresh) which is a tad annoying (you can hit Re-sync but that's a pain).