Optoma HZ40

    Date Acquired: May 2025
    Date Documented: May 2025

Overview

The Optoma HZ40 is a 1080p 120Hz DLP laser projector designed for gaming and supposedly home entertainment. It delivers a far-too-bright 4,000 lumens, so is generally visible during the day and gives you a headache during the night. As it's laser, it runs much cooler and quieter compared to its lamp-based counterparts and is rated for up to 30,000 hours of use.

Design

Its a generic white box with mushy buttons and manual lens adjustment. It's about as underwhelming as it can get. It feels cheap and is relatively light. The remote follows the theme and is quite unresponsive. It has no lens cap or protector. And for my last remark, it's also weirdly tall. Most standard data projectors are this length/width, but quite a bit thinner; don't know why.

Image of the projector on a stand.
Front

Looking at the I/O, it features the typical 2x HDMI ports, VGA port, and ethernet. But it also has a 5V 1.5A USB port and nicely gives you "Audio In" as well as "Audio Out". I had a peculiar issue where the physical tolerances of the HDMI ports were too tight so connecting cables was more challenging than it should have been.

Image of rear of projector showing video, USB and power connections.
Rear Ports

Image

This projector uses a DLP panel - the colours were too vibrant and couldn't easily be fixed, and it needed to be in HDR mode otherwise it looked bad. It generally had a washed out look, and had an awful rainbow effect. Black levels were not very good in a dark environment. And to top it off, the projection had a weird extra rectangle outside of the screen area which is mildly illuminated. Its not that noticeable in daylight or a dimmed room, but it annoyed me at night.

Image of rainbow effect generated by fast moving objects on screen.
Rainbow Effect
Image showing a faint illuminated border surrounding the projection image.
Illuminated box around image

The best part? I could not get the whole image in focus. When using a computer, it meant that the top toolbar was in focus but the bottom taskbar/dock wasn't quite, or vice-versa. The on redeeming feature was the 120Hz refresh rate, but in my humble opinion, was not worth it for all of the shortcomings. I would rather have 4K 60Hz, like with the BenQ TK850 which I got for a fair bit cheaper.

Closing Thoughts

From this experience, I have no idea why this projector was worth £420 when I bought it. I won't complain that I sold it for more but it wasn't a great experience in between.