Optoma HD26

The Optoma HD26 home theater projector suffers from some image-quality issues in its brightest predefined mode, but delivers excellent quality with other modes.

The HD26 is, at £550, a strikingly affordable single-chip DLP projector designed for, in Optoma’s own words, “super-sized home entertainment.” Key features include a very high 3200 ANSI

Optoma doesn’t provide either its 3D transmitter or glasses as standard with the HD26, and didn’t provide them for the review either, so we couldn’t test its 3D performance. We would say, though, that feeding the projector a 3D signal didn’t cause the strange red colour infusion witnessed with BenQ’s 3D DLP projectors. Also, experience suggests that DLP usually fares well when it comes to suppressing crosstalk ghosting noise with 3D sources.

The HD26’s picture quality comes as a very pleasant surprise. Particularly unexpected is how decent its black-level response is. We never found ourselves having to squint through any grey mist over dark scenes, which is a characteristic of many budget projectors, and we could also see impressive amounts of shadow detail in dark areas of the picture, helping dark scenes look as consistent in depth as bright ones.