Optoma TW675UTi-3D

With the arrival of the Optoma TW675UTi-3D ($1,800 street), you can add Optoma to the list of companies selling ultra-short-throw interactive projectors. Directly competitive with the Dell S500wi ($1,599 direct, 4 stars) and Epson BrightLink 455Wi ($2,200 street, 4 stars), it's also the most capable representative overall of its breed to date, which makes it Editors' Choice.

The TW675UTi-3D delivers an impressive balance of interactive capability, brightness, connectivity, and level of data and video image quality. It also offers 3D, and, uniquely for now, lets you turn on the interactive and 3D modes at the same time. The brightness goes way down, but it opens up some interesting possibilities for interactive 3D software.

Note too that you can mount the projector pointing straight down to create an interactive table top if you like. Although you can obviously mount any ultra-short-throw projector this way, in many cases the projector will overheat because of the change in airflow, and the lamp life will drop significantly. Optoma says that the TW675UTi-3D was designed with interactive tabletop applications in mind, and that mounting it so it points straight down will have no effect on lamp life.

The Basics
Aside from the ultra-short throw, interactivity, and 3D, the TW675UTi-3D, offers a garden variety set of features for a data projector aimed at a small to medium size conference room or classroom. It's built around a DLP chip, and it offers WXGA (1,280 by 800) resolution along with a 3,200 lumen brightness rating. As its 16.8 pound weight and 8.3- by 16.8- by 16.0-inch (HWD) measurements suggest, it's meant primarily for permanent installation, although you can also put it on a cart for room-to-room portability.

Setup is standard fare, with a typical set of connection options for data and video. Choices include an HDMI port for a computer or video source, two VGA ports for computers or component video, a VGA passthrough port, and both S-video and composite video inputs. There's also a USB port that will let you plug in an optional WiFi dongle ($29 street) for data or plug in a USB memory key with JPG and BMP files for the projector to read directly.

The Big Picture
By definition, ultra-short-throw projectors show big images from short distances. For the TW675UTi-3D, that worked out in my tests to throwing a 78-inch-wide image (92 inches diagonally at the native 16:10 aspect ratio) with the front of the projector just 10 inches from the screen.

As with all ultra-short-throw projectors, the actual projection distance is longer, because the lens is near the back of the projector, facing a mirror that reflects the image and sends it to the screen. The distance to the mirror was roughly 25 inches, just short of Optoma's maximum stated distance of 25.8 inches for a 100-inch image. Optoma's stated full range for image size is 77 to 100 inches at distances of 19.3 to 25.8 inches from the mirror.

Interactivity and 3D
The interactivity worked as expected in my tests for drawing, highlighting, and otherwise interacting with the image. As is typical, Optoma provides one interactive pen and an interactive program, in case you don't already have one.

One advantage of the Texas Instruments interactive technology that the projector uses is that it doesn't need calibration. The pen essentially looks at a grid (invisible to the human eye) that the projector overlays on the image, and it reports the co-ordinates it's pointing at. In addition to eliminating the need for calibration, this approach means that the pen only has to see the screen rather than touch it, which lets you use literally any surface?including a freely hanging screen with no support behind it. It also means you can walk around the room and interact with the screen from a distance, although you shouldn't expect to point at the screen with any precision from more than a few feet away.

The 3D feature turned out to be surprising. Most 3D-ready, interactive projectors won't let you use 3D and interactive modes at the same time. With the TW675UTi-3D you can. The brightness drops noticeably, but that you can do it at all opens up the possibility of using 3D interactive programs, a category that Optoma says is just starting to appear. This basically translates to helping future-proof the projector.

Of course, as with all inexpensive 3D-ready projectors at the moment, the 3D capabilities are limited. By itself, the projector will work only with a computer with a Quadbuffered, Open GL 3D-compatible graphics card. To use it for 3D with a Blu-ray player or the signal from your TV's set-top cable box you'll need to connect by way of a converter, like the Optoma 3D-XL ($400 street, 4 stars) that I used for my tests. You can't count this against the projector, however, since the same holds true (for now) for all of its competition, including, for example, the Dell S500wi.

Image Quality and Other Issues
The projector was easily bright enough for the image size I tested with to stand up to the ambient light in most offices or classrooms. It also scored well overall on image quality. For data images, it sailed through our standard suite of DisplayMate tests, with suitably eye catching color and no important problems. With video, it did a good job with skin tones and with maintaining shadow detail (details based on shading in dark areas), even in scenes that many projectors have problems with. It's not in the same class as a home theater projector, but for a data projector it does surprisingly well.

Also in the TW675UTi-3D's favor is that it has very little rainbow effect, with light areas breaking up into little red-green-blue rainbows when you shift your gaze or an object moves on screen. The effect is a potential issue for any single-chip DLP projector, but some show it more often than others, particularly with video sources. With the TW675UTi-3D they show so rarely that even people who see the rainbows easily, as I do, are unlikely to find them annoying.

Note, finally, that the built-in stereo audio system, with two 5-watt speakers, is a little disappointing. The sound quality is reasonably good, but the volume is suitable for only a small conference room. If you need audio, you'll probably need to use an external sound system.

The TW675UTi-3D offers a lot more strengths than weaknesses. On the plus side are brightness, image quality for both data and video, lots of connection choices, an ultra-short throw, suitability for mounting for an interactive table top, 3D, the ability to turn 3D and interactive mode on at the same time, and more. And on the minus side are...well not enough issues to matter all that much. The balance makes the TW675UTi-3D an impressive projector indeed, and our new pick for interactive, ultra-short-throw Editors' Choice.

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