I have been using this projector in my basement in our home theater setup. Love it since day one. I have had some problems with it though after about 2 years, cost me about $150 to repair (out of warranty). Also had a bulb explode on me ($200), but that can happen with any projector. Picture quality is fantastic, but given that I’ve paid $999 3 years ago and it was new, I’m not sure if this price is so great for a refurbished unit.
I paired this with a 110" electric screen from htdepot and feel like ive got a great system. With some budget in-wall speakers, a polk sub and an entry level yamaha receiver tweaked just right it really impresses for about $1500 all told. Prometheus on blu-ray really shows what this projector is capable of.
One small gripe is the lack of audio return, which means you will likely need to run hdmi and an audio cable from your source instead of just one hdmi cable.
Biggest concern is that it’s refurb (90 day warranty) which in and of itself may not be a big problem except the bulb has only a 30 day warranty, strongly suggesting that the bulb is not new. Bulbs seem to be the most fickle part of a projector.
I would be really surprised if they were not new bulbs. I think this was answered before a long time ago, but it would be good if a Optoma rep could verify that all the refurbished projectors have new bulbs in them.
The guys at AVSForum talked about this projector when it came out a couple of years ago, marketed mainly at Cosco, and at least one person bought one from woot! and stated the bulb counter said 5 hours.
Revision3’s HDNation did a nice video of the Optoma HD180 versus a $6500 projector and reviewed the HD180.
PRICE CHANGE!
Happy New Year’s Eve. We’re celebrating by lowering the price of this bad boy to $599.
If you purchased before the price change, you will automatically be refunded the difference. No worry.
Now, you know what I’m gonna say… go buy 3.
At first I was thinking someone had a valid gripe with the projector, but why would you ever want to have audio return from a projector??? This is the END of the HDMI pipe, and the audio should be pulled off by your switching receiver BEFORE the projector. This is definitely not a disadvantage for any Home Theater installation.
We got this same projector two years ago as a refurb here too and absolutely love it. For those of you concerned about the lamp being new or not, I believe our bulb had zero or less than five hours on it. We actually used this to project onto a light gray painted screen and you can’t even see the wall texture in the image.
We only decided to replace ours for their newer 3D model, but never had any complaints on this one!
We have this projector in our basement and it’s brilliant. (We got it about a year and a half ago.)
The bulb said 8 hours when I first fired it up and we’re still on the first one.
With the right set up, there is no need to go to the theater to watch movies.
Think of the money you could be saving!
I bought one of these new on Amazon a couple months ago, and have been loving it to death. I’m using a 120" pull-down screen and blu-rays look amazing, as sharp as the high-quality digital projection you pay extra for at movie theaters. Having tested it for movies, games and as a second display for my laptop, I found the quality is stunning on all three; small text is easily readable and you have to squint to make out pixels.
No thank you. I would like to get another BENQ Ultra Short Throw
Other than than being 1080 vs 720p, anyone know why I would buy this over the hd66 by Optoma? $534 on Amazon, really want to pull the trigger on one soon, and 1080p would be nice, but will it make that much of a difference and the HD66 has better contrast and can be brighter which might be nice for trying to watch with more background light.
http://projectors.findthebest.com/compare/40-41/Optoma-HD-180-vs-Optoma-HD66
http://www.amazon.com/Optoma-HD66-2500ANSI-Lumens-4000/dp/B002ZWU33U
I had to re-learn home theaters to update to hdmi hardware. Maybe the issue I describe has to do with my laptop which is the blu-ray source. We’ll see if the same thing happens when i buy a dedicated blu-ray player. It was just a gripe i had during setup.
Fearful of the short warranty I had a screen mounted and waiting for the projector to pop back up on woot. otherwise id buy it and it would sit unvetted while the 30/90 days expired. luckily i only waited about a month before woot put them up again.
My bulb timer said 12 hours when i hooked it up, and reads about 200 now. but i believe you can just go in there and reset the timer at will.
Yeah, this is why I wonder if the bulbs are new and they just didn’t reset the timer or if they actually just have a few hours on them.
Owned this for over a year. Makes my friends jealous. Just 2 days ago, however, the display was purple. Not sure if it was a problem with the DVD or with the projector. I could not reproduce the issue. Also, the projector is a great choice for high res stuff (PS3, blue rays, etc), but it makes the Wii look like crap. I think that’s more the fault of the Wii.
How come the only wooters for this deal are in the snow-heavy regions? Don’t they enjoy playing outside in the blizzard?
The bulbs in question usually have a MTBF of 3000+ hours on continuous high power use. The average household uses their projector 2 - 3 hours/day (via a study done on Projector Central). This would roughly equal 3 years of use on the lamp for daily use.
This is an average lifespan, and we have had many cases of users getting more than double the life out of the lamp depending on use.
All our refurbished projectors are thouroughly inspected for any and all defects before getting a quality approval. All of this is done here at our clean rooms which are inside our Headquarters in USA.