Want a proper big screen experience at home, don’t want to buy one of those giant TVs that cost more than your car? A 4K projector is your best bet. You might as well throw in a projection screen in there if you don’t want your wall’s paint job affecting the overall appearance of the pictures it beams onscreen. If you’d rather not set up a large screen in the living room every time you feel like watching something, though, you may want to pick up the Optoma UHZ50 laser projector instead.
Designed to deliver true-to-life colors, the projector is equipped with a wall color adjustment setting that can alter the beamed image based on your wall’s paint job. Granted, they don’t cover every imaginable paint color, instead opting for the most common colors for interior walls, namely gray, light yellow, light green, light blue, pink, and blackboard. Given how that short list covers most interior paint jobs, though, it should be enough to effect the proper color correction for most people.
The Optoma UHZ50 is a 4K laser projector that can beam your shows and movies in 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) at screen sizes as small as 34.1 inches and as big as 302.4 inches. Yes, that’s over 300 inches of screen real estate. It has a rated brightness of 3,000 lumens, which, the outfit claims, is bright enough to enable daytime viewing (so long as there’s no direct sunlight on the screen surface), along with a 2.5m:1 contrast ratio.
To ensure stunning color reproduction, it has 100 percent support for the Rec. 709 and DCI-P3 color gamuts, as well as HDR10 support and HLG HDR compatibility. They also offer a unique color management system that will allow you to fine-tune the color settings to better match your viewing environment.
The Optoma UHZ50 boasts a frame interpolation technology that eliminates motion blurring and image judder even on big screen sizes, making it ideal for watching fast-paced action movies and sporting events, along with full 3D support, in case you haven’t given up on that technology yet. As with many modern projectors, it’s designed to support gaming, touting a 16.7ms response time at 4K/60fps and a multiplayer-worthy 4.2ms response time when playing in 1080p/240fps. Naturally, it’s got all the conveniences found in modern projectors, including vertical lens shifting (for a wider range of placement possibilities), four-corner keystone correction, and even multi-point geometric correction (when you’re watching on a skewed wall).
A pair of 10W speakers deliver satisfying audio without having to hook up any external audio hardware, while a backlit remote lets you lean back and control the projector without having to get up. It has dual HDMI inputs, so you can easily switch between video sources, allowing you to lighten things with a funny YouTube video when the movie on the Blu-ray player gets a little too heavy for your liking. And yes, it’s compatible with streaming dongles like Chromecast, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV.
The Optoma UHZ50 is available now, priced at $2,799.
