Optoma PT100 "Playtime" projector. Don't play fool with it.
CuriousOne
Posts: 931
Hello.
Recently on woot and some other auction websites, these projectors (Optoma PT100), are appearing at very attractive prices (around $70) refurbished and with limited warranty. I bought one, perfectly understanding what to expect, but some folks may think that this is a great deal, below I'll try to explain why you should not consider this as any usable purchase:
1. It has very bad color rendering. Out of the box, the whites are yellow. You need huge time to tweak colors via your computer or video source (this projector has no settings to adjust colors). When you'll correct colors, you're loosing about 30-40% of total brightness, which is low initially.
2. It has very noisy fan. My 8 year old viewsonic projector with 200W bulb and 3000 lumens has much much less noise, than this 10W led, 50 lumen projector.
3. Non standard resolution of 854x480 and poor built-in scaling means that with devices, which are unable to output exact resolution, you'll get very jaggy, uneven picture.
I'm not mentioning the low quality of built-in speaker, absence of keystone/etc adjustments and so on. All this should be obivous, due to low price, but, the above mentioned problems aren't so clearly visible from the 1st glance, so beware.
P.S. Personally I'm going to take this projector apart, remove built in 10W RGB led, replace it with 100W one and add peltier cooler to DMD chip.
P.P.S. Forgot to mention, since this uses RGB led for color cycling, color flickering is much much less noticeable than with traditional color wheel projectors.
Recently on woot and some other auction websites, these projectors (Optoma PT100), are appearing at very attractive prices (around $70) refurbished and with limited warranty. I bought one, perfectly understanding what to expect, but some folks may think that this is a great deal, below I'll try to explain why you should not consider this as any usable purchase:
1. It has very bad color rendering. Out of the box, the whites are yellow. You need huge time to tweak colors via your computer or video source (this projector has no settings to adjust colors). When you'll correct colors, you're loosing about 30-40% of total brightness, which is low initially.
2. It has very noisy fan. My 8 year old viewsonic projector with 200W bulb and 3000 lumens has much much less noise, than this 10W led, 50 lumen projector.
3. Non standard resolution of 854x480 and poor built-in scaling means that with devices, which are unable to output exact resolution, you'll get very jaggy, uneven picture.
I'm not mentioning the low quality of built-in speaker, absence of keystone/etc adjustments and so on. All this should be obivous, due to low price, but, the above mentioned problems aren't so clearly visible from the 1st glance, so beware.
P.S. Personally I'm going to take this projector apart, remove built in 10W RGB led, replace it with 100W one and add peltier cooler to DMD chip.
P.P.S. Forgot to mention, since this uses RGB led for color cycling, color flickering is much much less noticeable than with traditional color wheel projectors.
Comments
I felt ripped off even on a $50 projector, because i wanted to play retrogames on it... but it refuses to display anything but perfect interlaced 525 line broadcast quality NTSC video... of which nothing earlier than the Nintendo Wii and original XBox put out. also that gross yellow and blurriness, as these devices are an attempt to sell rejected or defective optics.
Another misconception - "Oh, projector screens are so expensive, any white cloth will just do". This is wrong, and here's the sample.
The main background provided by very white (as seen by eye) fabric. The square at left is plain white office paper. The smaller square on the right is the projection screen fabric piece. See the difference?
And I've tried to adjust the camera settings in the way, to accurately display the brightness of Optoma PT100 in real world, with projected image of about 80 inches width.