Once I had it all aimed and squared on my Stewart Grayhawk screen, I dove into the projector’s menus. The menu system is easy to find your way around and responds quickly to the remote. I especially like the fact that a few test patterns were worked into it, a bonus the HD73 lacked. It offers many of the same image processing options, such as Image AI (II), BrilliantColor, and an iris. I opted to keep the Image AI off as it automatically switches the lamp mode into bright bringing down the lamp life by about a third. The iris and BrilliantColor features I engaged only minimally, but enough to make some improvements.
After I had spent time tweaking the picture settings, I played a series of high definition and standard definition sources. Through a PlayStation 3 and a Toshiba XA2 I viewed a variety of 1080p/24fps material and all looked fantastic. HDTV 1080i content from my Verizon FiOS TV receiver also came across beautifully. The first thing I noticed was the extremely impressive back levels—this projector really knows how to make blacks (or more precisely, it knows how to not send out light when it’s not needed). Throughout the BD version of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest I was continually impressed with how dark the HD80 was able to render dark parts of the screen while still maintaining the details. On brighter scenes the high contrast level resulted in punchier colors.
While I still firmly believe that projectors and flat panels with 720p resolution produce great HDTV pictures, a true 1080p source with a large 1080p display is even more impressive. This is one that will give you that boost in picture, without the sports car price. yy
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