Few projectors leave me feeling as ambivalent about them as the Optoma HD33 ($1,500 street) does. On the one hand, I love it. It's an impressive projector at a bargain price, with 1080p resolution in 2D and 3D and superb image quality. On the other hand...well, it shows rainbow artifacts, the little red-green-blue flashes that single-chip DLP projectors tend to show when light areas move on screen. If you can ignore the rainbows (and people who aren't sensitive to the effect can), it's a slam dunk winner. If you see them as easily as I do, however, it's an impressive choice, but one that you should approach cautiously.

In some ways, the Optoma HD33 is following in the path of the Optoma HD20 ($1,000 street, 3.5 stars) that I reviewed two years ago. When the HD20 was introduced, it dropped the entry-level price for 1080p significantly, making HD projectors far more affordable. The HD33 does much the same for 3D 1080p projectors, which until now have been in the range of $3,000 and (mostly) up.

Both the HD20 and HD33 fall in the same budget home theater category as the Editors' Choice Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 8350 ($1,299 direct, 4 stars). The key difference is that the HD33 is the only one that offers 3D, much less 3D at 1080p. However, it also lacks some useful conveniences you'll find on the slightly less expensive 8350. In particular, it doesn't offer horizontal and vertical lens shift. The feature gives you much more flexibility for where you can place the projector by letting you move the image with lens shift adjustments rather than moving the projector.

Setup

The HD33 looks a little smaller than its 4.5 by 14.2 by 12.2 inches (HWD), because of a rounded front end on its white case. One unusual touch is the lack of a control panel, so that the only way to change settings is through the remote. Another is a VESA 3D port.

As with the Optoma GT750E ($800 street, 4 stars) that I recently reviewed, the HD33 works with both DLP-link and RF glasses for 3D, and it comes with an external RF emitter that plugs into the VESA 3D port. RF glasses have the advantage of not needing a line of sight to the emitter, so they don't have to resync if you momentarily break the line of sight. Note that Optoma doesn't supply glasses with the HD33, so you might want to buy them at the same time as the projector ($100 each for the rechargeable Optoma models).

Aside from having to plug in the 3D emitter, setup is standard fare, with a 1.2x manual zoom giving you some flexibility in how far you can put the projector from the screen for a given size image. Connectors on the back include two HDMI ports, a VGA port for a computer or component video, three RCA phono plugs for component video, and one RCA plug for composite video. There are no audio ports. As is common with home theater projectors, the HD33 doesn't include an audio system.

Image Brightness and Quality

Optoma rates the HD33 at 1,800 lumens, which could easily be too bright for theater dark lighting and the image size that's typical for a home theater. However, you can drop the brightness to a more appropriate level by switching the lamp from bright to standard mode, and save money on lamps at the same time by increasing the lamp life from a rated 3,000 to 4000 hours. The high brightness also lets the image stand up to some stray light if you want to use it in, say, a family room. I tested primarily with theater dark lighting using a roughly 78-inch wide screen, or 90-inch diagonal at 1080p's 16:9 aspect ratio.

For the 2D tests, I used both DVDs upscaled to 1080p and Blu-ray discs. In both cases, the image was superb in almost every way. The HD33 took our toughest test clips in stride, maintaining shadow detail (detail based on shading in dark areas) and avoiding other issues like posterization (colors changing suddenly where they should change gradually) in clips chosen precisely because they tend to bring out those problems. The only issue I saw was moderate noise showing in large solid areas, like a wall or the sky.

Beyond that, the HD33 delivered fully saturated color with a level of sharpness that made 2D images seem ready to pop off the screen. It also goes a step further, with its PureMotion feature, which adds interpolated frames to reduce judder, the slightly jerky motion caused by the standard 24 frames per second that film uses.

Quite simply, the feature works, with three settings to choose from. The highest level gives the smoothest motion, but adds distracting artifacts. I found the lowest level, which is the default setting, the best compromise, giving noticeably smoother than standard motion without artifacts.

In some ways, the image is almost too good. There's a clear visual difference between film and live video that's hard to pinpoint but easy to see. It's based on some combination of crispness of image, smoothness of motion and perhaps some other issues that aren't obvious. In any case, as I proved to my own satisfaction by playing with the HD33's PureMotion settings, removing judder goes a long way to making filmed scenes look like live video instead.

This is not automatically a good thing. For me at least, watching a movie that looks like live video is a little unnerving, with my subconscious screaming that it just doesn't look right. However, odds are that as movies increasingly go digital, they'll also go to a faster frame rate, and we'll all get used to that live video-like image. In the meantime, if the better image really bothers you, you can always turn PureMotion off.

3D and Rainbows
The 3D image quality deserves just as much praise as the 2D quality, with all the same strong points. Very much worth mention is that, as with the GT750E and few to no other inexpensive projectors, the HD33 offers HDMI 1.4a ports rather than HDMI 1.3, so you don't need a video converter to show 3D from a Blu-ray player, cable, FIOS, or equivalent source.

My one hesitation in recommending the HD33 is that, as with every single-chip DLP projector I've ever tested, it shows rainbow artifacts. The good news is that it doesn't show them all that much. Keep in mind that some people see the rainbows more easily than others, so how much of an issue this will be depends on how sensitive you are to the effect. I see the rainbows easily, and see them often enough with the HD33 so I wouldn't buy it, but not so often that I'd mind watching a full-length movie on it occasionally at a friend's house.

If you're not sure how much this will matter to you and others you watch movies with, try to see the projector in action before making a buying decision. If you have to order one to see it, make sure you can send it back without too high a restocking fee. The projector is impressive enough otherwise to be worth the risk. Even if you can see the rainbows, you may decide they're worth putting up with. And if no one you watch movies with regularly is sensitive to the rainbow effect, the Optoma HD33 is almost impossible to recommend too highly.

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