 Could we kill the filming lights for just a short period so I can try it out? Dang, there's nothing quite like a giant projector screen, is there? This doesn't look like very gamer-y packaging, but with a lightning fast 240 Hertz refresh rate, 15.7 milliseconds of input lag, and HDR support, with up to a 120 inch screen, this projector sounds too good to be true. But Optimus says it is true. They claim that their UHD 30 is designed from the ground up for all gaming and delivers an unmatched gaming experience. But can it possibly get even close to what you would experience from a TV or even just a really big monitor? Can you actually get a convincing HDR gaming experience from a $1,300 DLP projector? What corners had to be cut to manage a 240 Hertz refresh rate? Is this gonna turn into one of those like nonsense debunking manufacturer save videos? Why hasn't Linus told us about the sponsor yet? Soundcore has released its latest wireless earbuds, the Liberty Air 2 Pros. They feature clear audio and multimode active noise cancellation. Learn more at the end of the video or at the link in the video description. The UHD 30 isn't the first gaming feature to have a very high resolution screen. The UHD 30 isn't the first gaming focused projector. And in fact, it's not even the only 240 Hertz model on the market. It just happens to be the only one that's priced within reach of consumers. And compared to past gaming projectors that focused on the stereoscopic 3D experience, the UHD 30's list of specs is more relevant to today's discerning gamer, including the standout features we wanna investigate today. 240 Hertz refresh rate at 1080p and a claimed 15.7 milliseconds of input lag. Now, obviously neither of these numbers are on par with the best gaming monitors today. But in the projector world where it's common to see 80 milliseconds of lag, this is a potential game changer. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Get it? Optima claims this unit can project an image up to 300 inches diagonally, but you're gonna start losing brightness and contrast pretty hardcore. Not to mention that you would need an absolutely massive room for that to make any sense whatsoever. I mean, the image alone would be over 12 feet tall and 22 feet wide. Also, this is not a short throw projector. So we settled on a 100 inch image, which already requires at least 11 feet between the projector lens and the surface of our screen. We wanted to go 300 inches, we need to back it right up. Now it's time for some gaming. And before you say it, yes, we know a 12 foot roll of seamless white paper isn't gonna give us the best performance, but it'll be better than the painted walls that we have here. So for a real setup, you should always leave room in your budget for a proper screen. Hey, wait a minute. What is this? Nicholas, you couldn't be arsed to fix the trapezoid shape of the image? The problem is Nicholas did notice this problem and did try to fix it. It's Optima who didn't feel that it was worth mentioning on the product page. Let's play around with the settings a bit, shall we? Oh, enhanced gaming. Well, we definitely want enhanced gaming, don't we? The enhanced gaming mode dramatically lowers the input lag, but it does come at a cost. Once you've enabled it, you can see here that our image is in fact square now, but that's only because our projector happens to be sitting in exactly the right position. When you turn on enhanced gaming, which you need for that low input lag, keystone adjustments cannot be made. So if we wanted to mount our projector up by the ceiling and have our screen down closer to our couch level, we would simply not be able to do that without experiencing some kind of distortion of the image. It's probably worth mentioning that if you don't care about input lag, it does have 40 degrees of keystone correction, but it's vertical only, not horizontal. So then I'm gonna grab this lttstore.com CPU pillow. Oh yeah. Get comfortable and assume that I am some kind of genius whiz kid projector mounting master and that we can get it configured right without relying on keystone and actually play some freaking games. I thought maybe we were plugged into the HDMI 1.4 port. So only one of them is HDMI 2.0, which you'll need for 240 Hertz, 1080P. After a little bit of tinkering, we've got it running at 1080P 240 Hertz with HDR. Turns out there's a bit of weirdness where games will think that the projector's default resolution is 1920 by 1200, which is not supported at 240 Hertz. So it can get a little confused. That feels pretty darn responsive. And HDR makes a big difference on a projector actually. I'm pretty impressed by how black, how black is around the edges. Like a lot of the time you can end up with black looking just kind of gray, cause there's not enough contrast. Overall, this game is a little dark right now for me though. Wow, that really does feel pretty darn good. I'm definitely noticing though that at a comfortable distance for the size of this image, I am seated right next to the freaking projector, which has kind of an annoying fan in it. And also I'm not able to sit dead center in front of the screen because I would block it. Not having any keystone adjustment, definitely an oversight, but I can't fault the responsiveness. Like that feels really good. And you know what? I don't even notice any rainbow effect. For those who aren't familiar, the rainbow effect is a phenomenon where as your eyes move around to look at different parts of the image, or as objects move around on the screen, you can see a kind of weird rainbowy fringing at the edges that can be quite distracting for some people. And impossible to notice for others. I'm reasonably sensitive to it. And what it basically means if we don't see it here, is that the mirrors are moving so fast that they're able to go all the way from one state to another without seeing those weird artifacts in between. While we were switching over to 60 Hertz 4K, we noticed another interesting disadvantage of gaming mode. 4K looks like absolute dog crap. Text looks, I would describe as pretty all right. We turn enhanced gaming mode on, and honestly, it looks as bad as 1080P, or maybe even a little worse than what I would expect. You see that? It's pretty, I don't know, it's pretty bad. This isn't the kind of thing that I would notice in game, but on the desktop, it's pretty jarring. Like here, like these hanging objects here, normally if we were at 1080P, I would definitely see stair stepping and aliasing on them, but it's like, I don't know, it's like 4K, but like here, let's bring up some text again. I mean, yeah, this text looks fine, but it's really, really big text. Yeah, and you'll see this looks crappy. Weird, huh? Could we kill the filming lights for just a short period so I can try it out? Dang. This looks freaking awesome now. I could get used to this. And in terms of input lag, not bad. We're only running at 60 Hertz now though. Like it's clearly not up there with the best gaming monitors, but it's fine. There's nothing quite like a giant projector screen, is there? Now that we've experienced it, let's talk about how this even works. How is Optima getting 240 Hertz out of a projector? How do DLP projectors even work? Well, at the core of every DLP projector, there's a lamp module, and the light output is then passed through a spinning color wheel. In this case, it's an eight segment RGBW RGBW wheel. This creates a rapid repeating sequence of red, green, blue, white, red, green, blue, white light. Speaking of RGB and projectors, by the way, we have a video with a sweet laser projector that we're gonna be trying out. Be sure you're subscribed for that. Just for some clarity, the white cell is actually just clear. This allows for a brighter overall picture. The light sequence is then reflected off of the digital micromirror device, or DMD through the lens, and then onto a background of your choice. The DMD chip in the UHD 30 has an array of mirrors that sit on a hinge with each mirror being a pixel, and the mirrors arranged in a 1920 by 1080 grid. These mirrors are digitally controlled, switching on and off in around one microsecond, flipping them from either reflecting light through the lens, or reflecting light away from the lens. For reference, by the way, a single frame at 240 Hertz is about 4,100 microseconds. So these things are moving real fast. To get a 4K picture, the DMD panel itself is actually shifted physically four times per frame. So you're literally creating four entire 1080p frames per real frame, and then stitching them all together to make a single 4K frame. Now, if you're willing to accept the additional input lag that we saw, it actually works really well. It's also conveniently how we get 240 Hertz out of this projector. Instead of a single 4K 60 image, they stop the pixel shifting and just give us the 1080p signal 240 times a second. 60 times 4,240, right? Quick math. Now, there's another thing that we wanted to try. And we obviously saw that in a completely dark room, the performance is way better. But Optima does have a bright mode. So it only gives you 4,000 hours of lamp life, but I do kind of want to know if it's any good. Oh, we actually don't know how to enable it. Well, nevermind, we won't be trying it because you have to go out of HDR mode in order to use that. So that's pretty dumb. One of the other good things about the UHD 30 over previous generations of DLP projectors though, is its ability to tilt the mirrors plus or minus 17 degrees, which is 40% more compared to the last generation. This improves contrast because it lets the mirrors redirect light away from the lens more effectively. Of course, we're gonna wanna see how that goes. So let's do a quick contrast measurement. We've got 0.35 lumens on one of our black squares and 23.9 on one of our white squares. What does that work out to? Is that it? That doesn't seem right. Is the rated contrast ratio at like, you know, a millimeter from the lens or what? Cause I get 776 there. Okay, I think it's not broken. We know that our testing environment isn't perfect for this, but the reality of it is nothing in the real world is because even if you have a completely lightless room, you're still gonna have light from the bright parts of your scene on the projector screen bouncing around in it. And it's pretty clear from what we measured that this thing is not even close to the advertised contrast ratio. The good news is that it still looks pretty darn good if you're in a dark room. The bad news is that projector manufacturers really need to stop making up meaningless numbers to describe their products because Optima says that this has a 500,000 to one contrast ratio. Get freaking real. So the conclusion is the same as it usually is. If you don't have complete light control, maybe a big fat Vizio TV is a better choice because performance will be better and the cost won't be too far off, especially once you factor in the price of a projector screen. If you need Keystone, this thing is completely out. But if you don't need Keystone, is this the projector for gaming? I mean, as long as you're under Optimal, get it, cause Optima, Optimal conditions, yeah, it's pretty sweet. Even if they oversell it a fair bit. Just like I'm gonna oversell you our sponsor. Woo! Soundcore by Anker is featuring the Liberty Air 2 Pros. They're wireless earbuds via Bluetooth with multi-mode hybrid active noise cancellation, six mics for ambient noise reduction, not to mention clearer calls, fast charging with USB-C or wireless, and seven hours of battery life with another 26 hours provided by the case. They're endorsed by 10 Grammy winning artists and you can check them out at the link below. A huge shout out by the way to Rob over at AVRant.com for answering some questions we had. We don't cover projectors all the time. So we're gonna have that site linked down below if you guys wanna learn more. And if you liked this video, hey, maybe check out how I turned my garage into a home theater on a budget. Pretty sweet.