About a couple of months ago both Vivitek Corporation and Optoma, announced the availability of the “below $1000” 1080p projectors. I expect both these affordable projectors to fly off the shelf during this holiday season. Until this announcement the best price you could get online with multiple discounts for a 1080p projector was about $300 higher.
These projectors may not have the rich feature set of the higher priced projectors but if you are just planning to watch a movie with good picture quality, have a tight budget (like most of us) and don’t care about bragging rights, these are projectors are just right. The higher prices you may for marginal improvements may not be worth it.
The Vivitek H1080FD has a native resolution of 1080p (1920×1080) resolution, 1800 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 5000:1. It comes with multiple input options; most notable are the two HDMI ports. The others are Composite Video, S-Video, Component Video, RS-232c and a 12v Trigger. The projector is based on the DLP® chipset from Texas Instruments to ensure the digital images don’t fade or degrade over time. It has an estimated lamp life of 3000 hours.
The Optoma HD20 also has a native resolution of 1080p, 1700 lumens and a contrast ration of 4000:1. Optoma states that the ANSI contrast ratio, a better measure of contrast, is 500:1 which matches it against more expensive projectors. The input ports match those of the Vivitek H1080FD (it does not have a S video port) but the estimated lamp life is 4000 hours, about 33% higher.
If you are on a budget and a home theater enthusiast, you cannot go wrong by buying either the Optoma HD20 or the Vivitek H1080FD. And, by the time you reach the end of life of these lamps, the next newer, faster, cheaper, technology would have arrived.
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