Optoma HD67N review

The on-screen menu system is easy to use. There are all the usual colour settings, including gamma and colour temperature, aspect ratio controls and keystone correction. The remaining Setup and Options menus include features like mirror and inversion controls – standard stuff, but essential if you want to mount the projector on the ceiling – along with mute and volume controls for the internals speaker, pin code locks, sleep modes and lamp intensity settings.

There are fewer picture modes than we’ve seen on many projectors: cinema, bright, photo, reference. They’re not that important, though, as you can tweak any of these to your heart’s content and set them to a user defined mode, getting the image you prefer.

Like every colour-wheel DLP projector, the HD67N suffers from the rainbow effect. Unfortunately, we experienced it more with this projector than we did with most of its rivals. It didn’t just turn up in black and white footage, but also around the occasional bright areas in our low-contrast test. This is a pity, as colours and shading in the predominately dark scenes were excellent. The rainbows also showed up in our fast motion test, including around running football players. There was also quite a bit of motion blur on all our fast-moving image tests.

Although the HD67N is certainly cheap, we found that the rainbow effect was too intrusive. Being 3D ready for gaming with a PC isn’t that much of a draw and you need an additional £250 convertor to watch 3D movies. The low resolution is also a little disappointing. If you’re on a really tight budget, it’s not a bad projector, but the Samsung SP-A600B has much better image quality and is worth the extra money.