Optoma HD600X 720P HD Ready Home Cinema Projector

I have been 'away' from the projection world for a few years and the last one I owned was an Infocus Screenplay 7205 which was a fine Home Cinema Projector lacking only in absolute black levels. I have recently found myself in a position to get back into projection (new house/new room) and was looking for a decent projector on a limited budget. The Optoma appeared to fit the bill being well specified for a very good price. So having set it up, these were my initial thoughts.....

Firstly, it is tiny! With a footprint smaller than an A4 sheet of paper, it would easily sit on a bookshelf if you prefered not to ceiling mount. It could go on a coffee table but as the height of the projector represents the bottom of the image, you may want it a little higher so as to avoid using digital keystone correction (artificially 'squaring' up the image on the screen) which lowers image quality.
Quickly setting the image to CINEMA mode, putting the BRILLIANT COLOUR setting to +5 (0 is off, +10 is maximum) and checking the lamp was on normal and not bright I stuck on an HDMI connected Blu-Ray of 'Avatar' and was greeted by a vibrant, highly detailed and terrifically contrasty image. Blacks were brilliant and far better than I remember the Infocus having. Colours where rich without looking overblown and the image had great 'snap'. The Rainbow Effect (flashes of the primary colours when the eyes flick from side to side of the image caused by the spinning colour wheel) where not severe in my opinion but different people are affected on different levels of severity by this so I can't say for sure that it won't be a problem for you. It was certainly no worse than my previous Infocus.

It is marketed as being 3D Ready but currently it will only work with a specific NVidia graphics card equipped PC and NOT with Sky 3D or Blu-Ray 3D. But sometime in early 2011 (Jan/Feb is quoted by Optoma) you will be able to purchase a seperate '3D-XL Adaptor Box' (£249 on Amazon) which looks a little like a thin, black DVD player and daisychains between your source (Sky3D or BluRay) and the projector to give full 3D compatibility. This is still a very cheap way into 3D projection and far cheaper than most 50" 3D TV's

Moving on, I then tried the Pixar movie 'UP' and it was here that I noticed a problem.

With the Brilliant Colour set to middle (+5)(Brilliant Colour introduces an additonal cyan, magenta, and yellow section to the colour wheel's usual red green and blue to boost colour in all tones) I noticed a lot of video noise in areas such as the sky. Instead of smooth gradient transitions, you get flares of colour and steps of shades. Reducing the Brilliant Colour setting reduces this problem and obviously increasing it makes it worse, but when lowering it, you also loose much of the 'snap' to the image I mentioned earlier.
The Brilliant Colour setting does give massive contrast improvements to the image and without it the image looks a little flat but these image artifacts are very distracting when they appear.

Saying that, for many if not most movies you'll probably not notice any problems, just cracking images. But it is this issue which led me to give only 4 stars out of five. For the money, the Optoma HD600X is a great buy, but don't expect reference standards from this budget PJ. As a first step into the projection waters, it's fine but if you are looking to get image perfection on a 100" screen, look elsewhere!

This is an excellent projector for gaming or movie watching.
The projector is easy to set up and easy menu navigation allow you to quickly tailor the settings.
It can cope well with fairly bright conditions, I was considering buying a proper screen for it, but after trying it out on a plain wall decided that the picture was clear enough as it is.
I havent used the built in speakers much as I have some separate speakers but they seem ok, I would recommend using a proper hi-fi though.
The remote control lights up making it easier to use in the dark which i thought was a nice touch.
My projector is set up just over 3m from the wall and is projecting an image up to 2.3m diagonally.

One slight problem is the fan which can be a bit noisy, but it isn't that noticeable once you have sound playing.

All in all a great bit of kit and a must for anyone wanting to get their hands on a reasonably cheap HD projector.

I'm writing this review because before I purchased this product I spent a lot of time fretting as to whether or not it was going to be any good. I have just finished installing the projector as I wanted it and I can say that it is amazing. I am using it to play both my Xbox 360 and PS3 against an Optoma 92" screen that I also purchased. The projector is mounted on a shelf as I didn't want to have any leads running from the ceiling. The projector is 11ft from the projector screen and this is just about perfect. The projector incorporates a very nice cropping feature so it is easy to fit it to any screen size. I have used it very happily for both Call of Duty: Black Ops and to watch Blu-rays and have been extremely happy with the results. My only warning is that the sound quality from the projector is quite poor and so I would not rely on it solely as your only audio output as it really is tinny and doesn't handle high pitch sounds such as shouting and gunfire very well. I hooked up a simple 2.1 Logitech system about 40 quid in Argos and it sounds great! I would suggest anyone without a current speaker system buy something like this at the same time, so don't say you weren't warned. So if you were having any doubts, I hope that this has helped to resolve them. Hope you're as happy as I am with it.