Review:

The HT1000 is a native 1024x768 Digital Light Processor powered projector. Projectors that use Digital Mirror Devices (DMDs) have had a couple of shortcomings in their infancy. First is contrast ratio, many of the first generation DMD projectors produced muddy blacks. The HT1000 has certainly overcome this problem as it produces a claimed 3000 to 1 contrast ratio (some have independently measured around 2500 to 1 so the claim is not far off). The second big complaint about DMD projectors is that they produce rainbows of color at moving light/dark transitions. Some people see these rainbows and others don’t. I’m one of the don’ts so I can’t make any comment about that possible flaw in the HT1000. I can say that the HT produces a beautiful picture with very good color saturation, plenty of contrast, good black detail, and a very good out of the box experience.

The setup of the projector is pretty much a piece of cake. The projector weighs in at a featherlike 7.1 pounds, making mounting a simple process that doesn’t need a structural engineer to come up with a strong enough mounting system (like most CRT projectors). It has a full complement of inputs (one each of composite, s-video, component, VGA, and DVI with HDCP) as well as a screen trigger output, a PC control input, and PC Card slot. There are also audio connections that probably won’t ever be used in a home theater. The lens has non-motorized zoom, iris (used for contrast enhancement), and of course focus. The projector can be floor or ceiling mounted (rear or front), and has quite good digital keystone correction if you can’t mount it in exactly the right spot. There is one aspect of the projector that can be of concern to some, for example with a 92” 16:9 screen there is 19” of drop required between the center of the lens and the top of the screen. So if you want a really big screen (110” or so) you may have problems as the screen will have to mount (or descend) almost to the floor.

The menus provide almost anything you would need to tweak the picture. The color controls include stock color temperature settings of 5000, 6500, 7800, 8500, 9300, and 10500 as well as the normal color and tint controls. The projector also has white balance controls in the user menus which are the equivalent of the red, blue, and green cuts and drives found in many rear projection TV’s service menus. The menus also provide slider controls for red, blue, green, yellow, cyan, and magenta. For most of us, there are more controls than we need to stay out of trouble, but for your friendly calibration expert they should provide the tools he or she needs to take you to color nirvana with the HT1000.

I’m using a 92” diagonal 16:9 Da-Lite High Contrast Da-Mat screen. This is a gray screen. There is still a fair amount of debate on the use of gray or white screens for DLP projectors but the tide seems to be moving toward gray in either the standard .8 gain screens or the 1.3 gain versions. I have the iris set at 50% and I’m very happy with the contrast and overall brightness of the picture in my setting. The color out of the box was quite good. I found that with slight tweaks using Avia and Video Essentials the component input looked very good with either a DVD or High Definition input. The s-video input had a bit too much green and I did do some messing about with white balance to bring it into line. Note that these are all adjustments made by eye as I have not had my projector calibrated to date.

The projector displays 1024x576 when fed a high definition (1080i or 720p) input. This would compare to the HD and HD2 projectors’ 1280x720. There is a discernable difference in resolution but in a side-by-side comparison at one of the CES exhibitors with an InFocus 7200 the HT1000 was ever so close in picture quality. On high definition feeds, I don’t feel deprived at all.

The projector includes Faroudja DCDi processing. While I have a progressive scan DVD player I did do some testing in interlaced mode and the processing in the projector looks to be very good.

The remote is pretty plain and one ‘feature’ is a bit irritating. The projector needs a 2 second press of the on button to trigger the projector to turn on and about a 4 second press of the off button to trigger a shutdown.

The only performance issue with the projector that I’ve seen reported is with the PAL standard (mostly Europe, Australia, New Zealand). There are reports of video tearing on at least some of the software levels of the HT1000 when used with PAL standard video.

All in all this is an amazing projector for the money. If you are considering one of the largest RPTV’s you could well substitute an HT1000 and a fixed screen (plus of course longer cables) for almost even money. You’d still need something to tune programs (i.e. a cable, satellite, or off the air tuner) but the total cost would be very close, and in my opinion almost everyone would be happier with a 92” screen versus a 65” or 72” big black box. For your money you get a great picture out of the box, perfect convergence, very, very good color, and something that you can carry up two flights of stairs all by yourself.

Features:

* Variable Iris
* SweetVision
* 3D Reform
* Faroudja DVDi
* Eco-Mode
* Enhanced 3D 10-bit Video Decoder
* Digital Photo Viewer