Popular projector brand Optoma has taken the wraps off a new “top of the range” 4K laser projector that it hopes will redefine both the sort of features and performance home cinema fans can expect to find in the sub-£4,000/$4,000 price category.
Currently being exhibited (until February 7) at the ISE 2025 show in Barcelona, the new UHZ68LV projector really does boast some eye-catching specifications for its money. For starters its dual-laser and DLP optical system is claimed to be capable of hitting a peak brightness of 5,000 lumens — an exceptionally high figure for a projector with a confirmed U.K. price of £3,999.99 (potentially $3,500 in the U.S.).
This sort of brightness should hopefully make the UHZ68LV particularly good at handling the demands of high dynamic range video that normally present projectors with such a tough challenge. It also enables Optoma to claim a very healthy maximum image size for it latest home cinema projector of 300 inches.
The Optoma UHZ68LV backs its HDR-friendly brightness up, moreover, by being one of the first projectors to support both of the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ premium high dynamic range formats. Now widely available across both streaming and physical media sources, Dolby Vision and HDR10+ provide extra scene by scene image data that compatible display devices can use to optimise their HDR playback, yet most projectors only support one format or the other, or else only handle the “core” HDR10 format which doesn’t provide the extra scene-by-scene metadata.
Experience suggests that HDR10+ and Dolby Vision support on projectors — especially very bright projectors like the UHZ68LV — can make a big difference to picture quality, so hopefully this trend will continue with Optoma’s new premium home cinema model. Supporting both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ also means, of course, that the UHZ68LV can claim to always take in the best version of any content you send its way.
As you’d hope with a DLP projector fuelled by so much brightness, the UHZ68LV also claims to be capable of reproducing a wide proportion — 95%, to be precise — of the DCI-P3 color gamut typically used for HDR mastering.
With such extreme image quality tools at its disposal, it’s reassuring to learn that the UHZ68LV carries the latest version of Optoma’s PureEngine processor, designed to ensure smooth motion, sharp details and more precise colour reproduction. Though if you’re a home cinema purist who’d rather turn as much image processing as possible off, fear not: The UHZ68LV also carries a Filmmaker Mode that keeps processing to a bare minimum to preserve the director’s original vision.
There are ISF modes among the projector’s picture presets, too, that can be used by professional calibrators to optimize the UHZ68LV’s pictures for your specific room environment if you really want to go the extra picture quality mile.
Optoma has also, though, made basic setup as easy as possible through such features as a generous 1.6x level of optical zoom, a comprehensive lens shift system, and what Optoma calls “360-degree projection capabilities”. In other words, regardless of whether you prefer a front, rear, or ceiling-mounted setup, you should be able to get the size of picture you want in exactly the position you want, no matter how challenging your room layout might be.
While Optoma positions the UHZ68LV as a home cinema projector, one of its two HDMI ports is capable of handling 240Hz refresh rates at full HD resolution, making it a potentially strong big-screen gaming display, too. I’m trying to get confirmation of whether the projector can also handle 4K/120Hz feeds, and will update this article as soon as I hear back.
While the UHZ68LV has only formally been unveiled for the European market so far, Optoma’s new projector is also set to appear in the U.S. soon for an as yet unconfirmed price.
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