The Optoma UHD55 is a 2,700-lumen 4K UHD projector that retails for a $1,799 MSRP and is designed for gaming and home entertainment. This new 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) projector offers advanced features such as a 1.3x optical zoom, vertical lens shift, HDR, a low input lag of 4.3 ms at 1080p for gaming, and both wired and wireless networking.
The Optoma UHD55 is a projector designed to satisfy the full spectrum of your home entertainment needs, from entering the world of Ultra HD gaming to getting immersed in all your favorite live sports, TV shows, and movies. The UHD55 offers a manufacturer's brightness rating of 3,600 lumens and dynamic contrast of 1,200,000:1. This brightness and contrast level should be more than enough to ensure an excellent picture in daylight or rooms with uncontrolled sources of ambient light. The UHD55's 4K UHD resolution and ultra-low input lag should provide users with a detailed, smooth, and high frame rate gaming experience. TV and movie lovers will appreciate the projector's wide DCI-P3 cinematic color and smart features, including voice control, Creative Cast, IFTTT, and a built-in media player.
The Optoma UHD55 offers many of the latest technologies and features in a very familiar-looking chassis. The UHD55 support High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Full 3D. It includes just about every connector needed for an entertainment projector, including two HDMI 2.0 connectors and three USB Type-A inputs. The projector also supports wired and wireless networking.
Optoma has tried to make installation easy by providing users with a 1.3x zoom, vertical lens shift, 3x3 warping, four-corner correction, and keystone correction for image alignment. Optoma says the UHD55 is designed to provide life-like, big-screen entertainment in almost any living space.
Optoma UHD55 Specs
Price
$1,799.99 MSRP
Technology
DLP w/ XPR (0.47” Single-Chip DMD)
Native Resolution
1920x1080x4 (3840x2160)
Brightness (Manufacturer Claim)
3600
Contrast
1200000:1
Zoom Lens Ratio
1.3x
Lens Shift
Yes
Lamp Life
4000 (Bright), 15000 (Dynamic), 10000 (Eco)
Weight
8.6 lbs
Warranty
1-year parts and labor, 90-day lamp
OVERVIEW
A gaming and home entertainment projector
Optoma is the number one 4K UHD projection brand worldwide. If that is not enough to convince you that Optoma is a top player in the projector industry, you should also know they are the world's number one DLP projection brand.
The UHD55, like its predecessor, the UHD50X, is designed to deliver impressive cinema-quality images with improved performance. The UHD55 provides users with 3,600 lumens of brightness, an updated input lag specification, and an enhanced contrast ratio.
As with many of their previous UHD series projectors, Optoma pushes the limits of existing technologies harder to gain better performance results. For example, in a world where more projectors are using lasers and LED light sources, Optoma has instead turned to the mature, proven, and affordable lamp-based light source and focused on maximizing its performance.
BrilliantColor is another technology used to get the most performance from the projector's Ultra High Performance (UHP) lamp. A UHP lamp is a high-pressure mercury arc lamp developed in the mid-nineties and should not be confused with a metal halide lamp. UHP lamps are highly efficient compared to other types of projection lamps.
Compared to Optoma's previous model, the UHD50X, this new projector offers a brightness rating of 3,600 ANSI lumens. This is an increase of 200 lumens and, more remarkably, a contrast rating that more than doubles the UHD50X. Because of these improvements, the UHD55 offers the promise of what Optoma calls lights-on viewing, enabling users to watch movies or play games in well-lit environments any time of the day.
The UHD55 uses an 8-segment color wheel that Optoma says will produce "the truest and most accurate colors,'' presumably in this class or price point, and technology that can achieve up to a 50% improvement in brightness over traditional three-color solutions. BrilliantColor technology offers up to six-color processing, enabling a wide color gamut and making it possible to produce over one billion colors.
Optoma conducts color lab simulations for their exclusive GAME display mode in different ambient light settings, allowing them to calibrate and boost details in the dark areas of the picture.
High frame rate gaming is another area that Optoma is leading in. No single-chip 4K DLP projector on the market currently supports anything higher than 4K@60fps. The ability to game at 4K@120fps is limited to a handful of expensive, high-performance 3-chip projectors. Gaming in Full HD at 240 frames per second currently requires a fairly powerful PC. Increasing refresh rate generally results in a reduction in input lag. When gaming in HD at 240 fps, the Optoma UHD55 input lag is just 4.3 ms which is incredibility low.
As we mentioned, the UHD55 supports HDR and is compatible with HDR10 and HLG content. HDR improves the ability to identify objects in the projected image's extremely bright and dark ranges. For gaming, this is a critical advantage that could reduce the chance of being killed by another player hiding in the shadows. HDR movies and HDR-encoded TV shows display more contrast between a picture's light and dark areas, thereby showing more subtle details, resulting in an overall improved viewing experience.
The UHD55's Dynamic Black technology is one of the key reasons that Optoma claims this projector can display a 1,200,000:1 contrast. Dynamic Black eliminates the need for an aperture ring on the projector to adjust for dark scenes. It also adds depth to the projected image by smoothly adjusting the lamp output to create a nearly three-fold increase in the projector's contrast ratio compared to equivalent projectors that don't use Dynamic Black. Bright scenes appear crisp and clear, while dark scenes retain shade detail within darker areas of the picture.
DLP projectors need all the help they can get to improve the quality of black levels, and Dynamic Black is a Texas Instruments technology explicitly designed to do just that.
HIGHLIGHTS
Price: $1,799 MSRP
Technology: Single-Chip DLP (0.47″ DMD) with XPR technology
Light Source: Lamp
Display Resolution: 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160 pixels)
Brightness (manufacturer’s claim): 3,600 lumens
Light Source Lifespan: up to 15,000 hrs (DYNAMIC), 10,000 hrs (ECO), 4,000 hrs (BRIGHT)
Contrast: 1,200,000.1
HDR and HLG-compatible
Wide color gamut support: 97% DCI-P3
WiFi: via included USB dongle plus RJ45 connection
Smart home compatibility: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and IFTTT
