Themescene H27, Waiting for HD

Ceiling or tabletop?

• It is getting easier and easier to have a good picture at home without talking about expensive products.

• Price: €1,520

• Specialists' rating: 4

• Text: Ramon Sendra

Many people would like to have a video projector in their living room to get closer to what we understand as a true home theater. The video projector is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular devices around today, and thanks to the constant introduction of new developments and advances, prices are getting lower and lower. Many manufacturers are aware of this and have few qualms about launching, from time to time, an affordable product, albeit one with limited features.

The H27 we bring you here could be included in the latter category. It is a standard-resolution projector (480 lines, that is, ideal for NTSC signals, somewhat lower compared with the best PAL signal we can obtain), whose main attraction is precisely its price. In fact, because of its price it becomes the affordable alternative before taking the definitive step to high resolution. With this H27, Themescene (or Optoma, if you prefer) offers another valid alternative to other products already reviewed in these same pages, such as the Toshiba MT200, the NEC HT410 or the Screenplay 4805. All are characterized by their "low" price, albeit with standard resolution.

Our guest (very similar to the Optoma EP739 we reviewed a few months ago, although the H27 is the "cinema" version) is very compact and lightweight. This makes it easy to install in any living room or room in our home, and even to carry from one place to another without too much trouble (it does not come with a carrying case), but it is not an alternative for offices or meeting rooms, basically because of its "low" brightness rating: it is designed solely for audiovisual applications.

It includes a 0.5" DMD chip with a resolution of 852x480 pixels, specifically the DC2 version, whose results we already know from other designs. The color wheel is 4x speed (like most of its rivals, surpassed only by the MT200, which reaches 5x). The lens, with manual focus and zoom, is long-throw (probably, if we compare it with other models, the longest in its segment), which necessarily means placing it farther back to achieve the same screen diagonal. This characteristic, together with the absence of lens shift and a fairly high offset (over 50%), invites ceiling mounting, which undoes all the previous portability advantages.

Its connection panel is quite complete, including a component video input (compatible with progressive signals), DVI-D (HDCP), S-Video, composite video and a DIN-15 input which, using adapters, lets us connect Y/Pb/Pr, VGA or SCART signals (the European model comes with a SCART-VGA adapter).

The on-screen menu is quite comprehensive, and depending on the input selected we will have access to different settings in its OSD menu. Thus we find controls for brightness, contrast, color, gamma, sharpness, white peaking, color temperature, and controls for each of the three primary colors R, G and B.



TESTED



Adjusting the settings will not be a problem even for beginners. In fact, the projector comes quite well calibrated from the factory, to make the task easier for those who still struggle to achieve the best configuration.

But one quickly realizes our guest's Achilles' heel: brightness.

In the specifications the manufacturer states a brightness of 850 ANSI lumens, but once the projector has been adjusted (using the DVE patterns), this brightness clearly drops by up to 25%. Although with this setup it is possible to enjoy decent blacks (it reproduces the always difficult details of the Mines of Moria, though because of the low brightness its contrast is also reduced) and the whites hardly tend to clip (Cold Mountain helped me check this), on a screen with a diagonal of over 100" a lack of brightness is noticeable. In fact, so as not to lose detail in dark scenes, it might be best not to go below 75-85" and to keep ambient light under control: everything should be dark.

Color reproduction is quite good, with some losses in the lower part of the gray scale, but with proper saturation in bright scenes.

An important feature of our guest is its almost total silence, which will allow the projector to be placed very close to us without bothering us during viewing, something typical of the brand.

Without doubt the best thing about this ThemeScene H27 is its price. It offers a fairly decent picture as long as certain conditions are met, such as keeping ambient lighting under control and not wanting to project onto too large a screen. Its low real brightness makes this clear.

But for its price, and while we wait for high-definition projectors to become the norm, this H27 can be seen as an affordable, temporary alternative to the definitive projector that will live with us.

Ceiling or tabletop?

If we place a projector on a table and, without lens shift, project directly onto the screen, there is always a distance between the horizontal level marked by the projector and the bottom edge of the image. This distance is called offset, and in the case of this H27 it exceeds 50% (that is, the distance between the base and the start of the image is more than 50% of the height of the projected image). A high offset percentage normally invites ceiling mounting, since it will naturally "bridge" the distance between the horizontal line of the ceiling and the start of the image.

In a projector without lens shift, any electronic modification of the image geometry (what we know as Keystone) means losing part of the image resolution, sometimes very noticeably. So in the case of this H27, the best option would be to mount it on the ceiling, even though this makes any temporary move difficult.

When we decide where to place our projector, we should take into account the lens shift function, the lens throw, the Keystone function and the offset value, although we recommend not abusing these functions and features.

Themescene H27, Waiting for HD

Specifications

Chip: Texas Instruments DarkChip 2 DMD DLP. Native resolution: 854x480 pixels. Color wheel: 4x speed, RGBRGB. Signal compatibility: NTSC, NTSC 4.3, PAL, PAL-M, PAL-N, SECAM, HDTV (480i/p, 576i/p, 720p, 1080i). Connection: Includes DVI for signals with CDP function and support for 480p, 576p, 720p and 1080i. Deinterlacer: Built-in with 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown. Brightness: 850 ANSI lumens. Contrast: 2,500:1 (full On/Off). Lamp: 200 W SHP. 3,000-hour service life. Noise: 28 dB. Power consumption: 265 W maximum. Dimensions: 277x236x105 mm.

Distributor: Cinaudio (cinaudio@cinaudio.es).

Price: €1,520