At the CEDIA expo, lots of 1080p projectors were shown off. For a review, check out this CEDIA 1080p projector page at Projector Reviews. One 1080p projector fighting it out with some of the new ones from Panasonic and Sony is the Optoma HD81. Ultimate AV has recently reviewed Optoma’s HD81 1080p DLP projector. This projector has a retail price of seven grand, and comes with an outboard video processor.

The projector has a manual focus and manual zoom, but no lens shift. That makes placing the projector a bit hard, which I find odd for a $7000 projector. The projector reviewed was actually a pre-production unit, so maybe some of the problems encountered by Mr. Norton will have been fixed in the production run. See the articles for full details, but he had problems like the on-screen menu freezing up, strange video settings, and more.

The projector had some good picture quality points going for it, with great optics. But the auto iris mode seemed to have problems as well. Even with all the problems however, Mr. Norton found that the picture quality was the best of all Optoma projectors he’s seen.

Optoma HD81 1080p DLP Projector