Best in Class – $5000-$25,000 Performance Home Entertainment: Optoma UHZ65

The Optoma UHZ65 is mostly the laser version of the UHD65. And that UHD65 was one of the first 4K UHD projectors to ship, just over a year ago.

As I see it, so far there’s just not a whole lot of demand for 4K capable projectors on the business and education side of things, which for projectors is a far larger market. There is some demand for high end, such as museums, engineering applications, etc., but momentum is just starting up. As a result, it seems that just about all the 4K UHD DLP projectors marketing are targeting home theater, while waiting for 4K to get more traction commercially.

That tends to have us noticing 4K UHD laser DLP projectors considered for home, that lack pretty standard features on even lower cost projectors such as CFI for smooth motion (Creative Frame Interpolation). Not so this Optoma, it has all the usual bells and whistles you look for in a projector designed for home.

Ron pointed out in his review that none of the color preset modes was especially good, that is accurate, but 2,200 lumens in Cinema mode (mid-zoom) provides a very nice combination of picture quality and brightness. The Optoma did not calibrate quite as well as the Acer, either, but more than fine for those of us who never play with the color on our less than perfect LCD TVs.

The color wheel on the UHZ65 is an RGBY – yellow, not clear for the extra slice. That is, in theory, not as good as the RGBRGB wheel on the lamp based UHD65. Still, the rainbow effect is less noticeable in the Optoma than the Acer.