Optoma’s Newest Projector Brings the Movie Theater to You

Home theater projectors are awesome.

For about $2,000—if you include the price of a decent screen to shine it on and a few bags of Jiffy Pop popcorn—anyone with an HDMI cable and a dream can get picture quality that very nearly rivals the shuttered local cineplex. Throw in another $500 for a Dolby Atmos soundbar and a Roku, and you’ve got yourself a truly immersive home theater. Right now, such escapes are more special than ever.

When it comes to (relatively) affordable projection at home, it’s a battle of steady technological progress between BenQ and Optoma. Over the past five years, the two brands have offered what I'd call perfect successors—with every new model, performance improves yet prices go down. Optoma’s new UHD50X is a good example. It's $1,000 cheaper than the first 4K Optoma projector I plugged in years ago, and it has much better picture quality.

Better still, the UHD50X finally takes aim at a projector's Achilles' heel: input lag. Plug in a powerful gaming computer and the new Optoma offers a 240-Hz refresh rate, making it visually smooth and speedy enough for all but the most competitive gamers. Like watching movies as much as you like winning life-size games of Project Cars 2? So do I. That's why the UHD50X is my favorite home theater projector right now.

I’ll be the first to admit that projectors don’t offer anywhere near the image quality you’ll get from a TV that costs the same price. In fact, for nearly the same money you’d spend on the UHD50X, you could get a new LG CX OLED (8/10, WIRED Recommends), which offers museum-quality picture. And yet, I’d still rather watch most things with the projector.