- Can 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
240 Hertz 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 Optoma 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 $1,300 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 beep
manufacturer save 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. (bright music) The UHD30 isn't the first
gaming-focused projector and in fact it's not even
the only 240 Hertz model on the market. It just happens to be the
only one that's priced within reach of consumers. And compared to past gaining
projectors that focused on the stereoscopic 3D experience, the UHD30's list of specs is more relevant to today's discerning gamer, including the standout features we want to investigate today. 240 Hertz refresh rate at 1080p and a claimed 15.7
milliseconds of input lag. 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. (laughing loudly) Optoma 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. If we wanted to go 300 inches, we need to back it right up. Now it's time for some gaming. And before you say it, "Yes we know what 12 foot
roll of seamless white paper isn't gonna give us the performance," but it will be better
than the painted walls that we have here. So for a real setup, you
should always leave room in your budget for a proper screen. Hey, wait a minute, what is this? Nicholas? You couldn't be arse 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 right worth
mentioning on the product page. Let's play around with the
settings a bit, shall we? Oh, enhanced gaming. Well, we definitely want
enhanced gaming, don't we? The enhanced gaming mode
dramatically lowers the input lag 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. I'm gonna grab this
lttstore.com CPU pillow. Oh yeah. Get comfortable and
assume that I am some kind of genius Whizkid
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 240 Hertz, 1080p. After a little bit of tinkering, we've got it running at
1080p, 240 Hertz with HDR. Turns out there's a bit of
weirdness where games will think that the projector's default
resolution is 1920 by 1200 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 'cause
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 60 Hertz 4K we noticed another interesting
disadvantage of gaming mode. 4K looks like absolutely dog crap. Text looks, I would describe
as pretty all right. We turned enhanced gaming mode on and honestly it looks as bad as 1080p or maybe even a little worse
than what I would expect. Do you see that? 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 these hanging objects here, normally if we were at 1080P, I would definitely see
stair-stepping and aliasing on them, but it's like 4K but... Like here, let's bring
up some texts again. This text looks fine, but
it's really, really big text. Yeah, and you'll 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 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 Optoma 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 RGBWRGBW 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 gonna 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 1920 by 1080 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 240 Hertz is about 4,100 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 lag 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 x 4240, 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 Optoma does have a bright mode. It only gives you 4,000 hours of lamp life but I do kind of wanna
know if it's any good. Oh, we actually don't
know how to enable it. Well, nevermind, we won't be trying it because you have to go out of
HDR mode in order to 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 gonna
wanna see how that goes so let's do a quick contrast measurement. We've got 0.35 lumens on
one of our black squares and 23.9 on one of our white square. What does that work out to? It's about eight? That doesn't seem right. Is the rated contrast
ratio at like a millimeter from the lens or what? 'Cause 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 gonna 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 Optoma says that this has a 500,000:1 contrast ratio. Get freaking real. 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? 'Cause Optoma. Optimal conditions,
yeah, it's pretty sweet even if they oversell it a fair bit. Just like I'm gonna
oversell you our sponsor. Woo! Soundcore by Anker is featuring
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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. We're gonna have that
site linked down below if you guys wanna 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.
