That's an Optoma MovieTime. So you're one of the handful of people that bought one?
Just kidding.
That was something from around 2005~2007. Quite a lot has changed in the range of tech available - both good and bad - but also in prices, which have generally fallen (that's good) and in brightness, which has increased (even better).
The past ten years or so have seen a flood of cheap Chinese projectors hit the UK market thanks to low cost shipping and the power of Internet-driven sales. What's not so good about that is there's a lot of dross now hitting the UK shores. A quick look on Amazon and Ebay will have you convinced that for under a £100 you can have a projector the size of a pack of gum with a million-billion Lumens of brightness and a lamp that will last longer than our sun. It's all a con. Our Oriental friends seem to be quite happy to stretch the truth to breaking point to catch the unwary buyer.
Everything I've seen in this class of product could more accurately be described as a toy. They're not in the same class as your current Optoma in the tech used to create the image, and in the lens quality used to provide sharp focus, and in the video processing tech responsible for turning a digital data stream from disc in to spots of light on your screen.
That's the bad out of the way so you're not going to waste your time and money on some junk. Now on to the good stuff.
The current consumer-market for projectors can be split in to three segments; Entertainment, Gaming, and then the more dedicated Home Cinema segment. Although there are some overlaps, the sector you'll probably be most interested in is Entertainment.
Gaming projectors have a similar short-throw to your current DV10. Some are even ultra-short-throw. Fan noise isn't prioritised so much, and neither is absolute black level. These are table top projectors designed with brightness and low image lag in mind. The Optoma GT1080e @ £599 is a good example. It has a very short-throw lens: The throw distance is the screen width (side to side, not diagonal) divided by 2. IOW, if you wanted an 8ft wide image, then the projector would need to be just 4ft from the screen to do that.
Entertainment projectors are more of an all-round performer. The latest crop of Optoma machines are very bright (3000 ANSI lumens or more in full power mode), so can be used to watch TV and sports even with some room lights on, and yet they still manage to do reasonable black level in order to achieve good contrast when it's time to dim the lights for the big film. The lamp power can also be varied. A lower setting reduces fan noise, and improves black level and contrast, and also increases the estimated lamp life.
The lowest cost Optoma in this category is the HD143X @ £430-ish. There's also a Benq, the TH585, @ £450, but it doesn't offer any advantages. In fact, although marginally brighter on paper it's noticeably noisier and has poorer contrast.
The Optoma HD28e @ £520 is marginally brighter, and with higher contrast, but at the expense of slightly more fan noise in both eco and full power modes. You do get a backlit remote, but you lose one HDIM socket compared to the 143X with two.
Looking very similar at first glance, it might be hard to understand why the Optoma HD29He is £650 compared to the HD28e. After all, the brightness figures are the same. The answer is that the 29He supports a 120Hz refresh rate and incredibly low input lag. If you're a gamer,
and I mean a serious gamer, then this projector is a proper bit of kit. That's saying something because the HD143X already has low lag for a projector, and can show a lot of TVs how it's done too.
Dedicated
Home Cinema projectors start at prices north of £1000. They're not as bright as the entertainment projectors, but the black level and the contrast is much better.
All of the projectors above are 1080p HD resolution. They'll work with DVD*, and with
NowTV, and streaming sticks such as a Fire Stick. With the exception of the GT1080, they all have zoom lenses which offer the ability to adjust the picture size over a small range. As a rough rule of thumb, the throw distance is the screen width x 1.5
What you won't find at these sorts of prices is any ability to connect hardware sources via a wireless link. Streaming content from Amazon or Netflix or Disney+ to a suitable media player is one thing because the data is unpacked on arrival. That's a very different proposition to taking a HDMI signal, converting it to a form that can be sent wirelessly, and then unpacking it at the other end with significant compression losses.
The tech to do this does exist. Some projectors had/have it built in. However, the 1080p resolution projectors at £1500+ which had this have been supplanted by models focussing on 4K UHD compatibility. The bottom line here is you'll be looking at spending a serious wedge of cash if you definitely want wireless.
This brings us on to
4K UHD projectors. In particular, the budget projectors in this category. They start at around £1000. The question is whether you should buy one of these rather than sink £500-£700 1080p unit. After all, UHD is available on the main streaming sites, so it's definitely here to stay, and nearly all TVs are UHD as standard. Why not match it with a projector then? Money aside, it seems like a logical choice, but there's a few things you should be aware of first.
The main one is that the imaging tech in these entry-level projectors isn't true UHD. Unlike TVs which are UHD 3840x2160 pixel resolution, getting the imaging chips inside a projector to that resolution has been an incredibly expensive process. What they use instead is chips that are a half-way-house between 1080p and UHD resolution, then mate that with some tech that image shifts to make a pseudo UHD image. It works reasonably well, but there's a problem with it.
An absolutely huge chunk of the manufacturing budget has to get thrown at the chip and image shifting tech which doesn't leave much left for the scaling and image processing at the front end, or the light path and lens quality after the imaging chips. The upshot is that these projectors never really get their ducks in a row. Either the front-end scaling tech struggles with anything that isn't already UHD resolution; so Blu-rays and DVDs plus HD and SD TV/streaming etc don't really get to shine, or when the projector is fed with a UHD signal, there's not enough budget left to buy a lens good enough to show the resolution properly. It's all too compromised.
That's not the end of it. UHD resolution isn't all that impressive on its own. The killer features of UHD are the bigger colour range (BT.2020) which is how we get the Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) feature, and High Dynamic Range (HDR) which is the ability to show more detail in the bright and dark parts of an image simultaneously.
Things get slightly trickier with HDR because there are four standards. HLG is what the TV broadcasters such as Sky use. Then for streaming and from discs there are three other standards. HDR10, HDR10+ and DolbyVision. The last two are enhancements on top of the core HDR10 format. With the budget UHD projectors you're lucky if you have any true compatibility at all. Some of them will understand a WCG/HLG or WCG/HDR10 signal, but then down-convert it to something closer to Blu-ray standard.
If that wasn't all then the bit that catches folk out is the cost of long cabling capable of carrying the UHD signals.
Of course, all this about UHD projectors means nothing if your budget is less than a grand. But even if you can stretch to it, I don't think it's a good move unless you can spend a good £2000 on a projector. Stick with a 1080p projector. As a breed, they're well sorted. The 143X should knock your socks off. Get a ceiling bracket. Run a long (and inexpensive) HDMI cable. Enjoy your TV and streaming sources.
DVD* - the player musty have a HDMI output, or you can play a DVD disc in a Blu-ray player.
