Vivitek DH3660Z Laser Projector Review – Picture and Sound Quality

Vivitek DH3660Z Laser Projector Review – Picture and Sound Quality: Color Modes, Video Picture Quality, Text and Presentation Quality, Audio Quality

The Vivitek DH3660Z has six preset color modes, and one User Mode. They are: Bright, Presentation, Movie, Game, sRGB and DICOM SIM. Of these modes, any will be suitable for your business and education applications, save for Bright and DICOM SIM. Bright, as is typical of the brightest modes on projectors, is an ugly green. No uglier than any other DLP projector I’ve seen, but it does fall into our “break glass in case of emergency” classification when it comes to this mode – that is, don’t use it unless your room conditions absolutely call for it.

Though you could use any of the modes – Presentation, Movie, Game, sRGB or User – for your presentations and projecting documents and websites, I chose sRGB to project my presentation slides and websites. Presentation is much brighter, though it doesn’t have as good of color as sRGB (it really has those mustard yellows and wine reds that are characteristic of DLP projectors), so if your room environment has uncontrollable ambient light, you might opt for that. It’s really up to you. If you like cooler tones, Game Mode will please your eye.

Movie would be just fine for presentation content as well, but it definitely has a warmer tone that lends itself well to the reproduction of skin tones, which is why I chose it for taking the photos of the video content I use to test these projectors. User Mode has good color that you can customize to your liking, and it starts out with quite a bit of lumens, too, which we’ll get into on the next page.

DICOM SIM. is a mode designed for viewing high contrast films, such as X-Rays and MRIs. I keep a set of X-Rays taken from when my cat decided to eat a bunch of stuff she’s not supposed to (she has Pica, of all things) so that I can use them to determine how good (or not) a projector’s DICOM SIM. Mode is. Those X-Rays are included in the slider below.

I truly enjoyed the picture quality of the Vivitek DH3660Z on video content. Being 1080p (1920 x 1080), it comes as no surprise that the projector’s image is nicely sharp and its pixels clean. As always, I used content from a BluRay disk of Journey to Space, and the Netflix show Explained, to test the projector’s color capabilities and sharpness. I was decently impressed with the color in Movie Mode, which I used to project these images.

Movie Mode, as mentioned, is the best mode for viewing video content. Skin tones look natural, and it is the most true-to-color of all the modes, though sRGB will also produce good color. In an ambient light pinch, you could absolutely use Presentation, or even use User Mode to tinker with your own color preferences. Movie Mode is one of the brightest modes, however, so in most cases, I believe it should suffice.

I use this photo from Journey to Space as one of my determining factors as to if I like a projector’s color. There’s lots of depth and contrast to this shot, which is helpful to my eye when determining picture quality. All in all, this Vivitek has great color, though it is not 100% accurate. I’m sure with a little tweaking, you can get the color to be pretty accurate, though for most applications, you won’t want to bother. Unless your applications require perfect color reproduction, like with graphic design or a similar field, then the DH3660Z will meet your color needs.

Text and presentation quality is excellent on this Vivitek, and I would expect nothing less of a 1080p projector. This makes it suitable for a variety of environments, including high school and college classrooms, and perhaps even a lecture hall or auditorium if it’s hooked up to an external sound system, which it would be.

In most classrooms, projectors are used for presentations, lessons, projecting documents such as essays or other assignments, and showing educational videos. Any text that you might throw at this projector will be reproduced beautifully, and be clearly readable from anywhere in the room, no matter the size, as you can see from our test graphic below.

We use a test graphic to determine text readability for each projector we review. This test graphic has a variety of font sizes, starting at the smallest – 8-point font – and font styles, which helps us establish the sharpness of text on all kinds of presentations, infographics, documents, and other such applications.

Overall, I found the text to be totally readable, even at 8-point, though it is highly unlikely that you will encounter this font size on your typical presentation, graphic, website or document. The further back you go, of course, the less readable that text will be. The other font sizes, starting at 10-point, I had no problem reading. 12-point and above is most likely what you will see, and it is nicely sharp when projected by the Vivitek DH3660Z.

I chose sRGB for these text and presentation photos. It has well-balanced color, and just all around looks really good on this type of content. As you can see from the presentation slide above, text looks super sharp, and the color looks great. Again, you can use any mode for presentations – it’ll be up to your preference and room conditions. Presentation, Game, Movie, sRGB and User will all work for this type of content.