Optoma CinemaX P1
It isn’t cheap, but this short-throw 4K projector is worth the money.
Short-throw projectors are arguably changing the way you can set up your home theater. Gone are the days when you have to mount a projector to the ceiling or make sure nothing is in front of it. Now, you can simply plop a projector down in front of your screen or surface.
Just take a look at the Optoma CinemaX P1.
At a hefty$8,499, the projector certainly isn’t cheap – and is reserved more for those who are building a dedicated home theater space and want a quality image to match – but for those who can afford it, it presents spectacular images without any of the fuss of traditional projection systems.
Here’s what it’s like to test one out.
Design
The Optoma CinemaX P1 is built to look and feel premium – and it succeeds at doing that. The projector offers a super sleek black-and-gold color-scheme that should look great in any home theater – plus the remote is uncomplicated and easy to navigate.
At 22.1 x 5.1 x 15 inches, the projector itself might be a little bigger than it looks in some images, but it’s not too big for something that you can put on a table in front of a screen. That said, it’s not necessarily a great portable option so don’t plan on bringing it with you to your friend’s next movie night.
On the front of the projector, you’ll find a gray fabric covering for the speakers, while on the sides you’ll find vents for the built-in fans, along with a HDMI 2.0 port and USB port on the right side for convenience. And, of course, on the top, you’ll get an angled opening for the laser in the projector.
The back of the projector is where you’ll get all the other ports,
At a hefty $8,499, the projector certainly isn’t cheap and is reserved more for those who are building a dedicated home theater space and want a quality image to match.
and there’s a good selection of them. There’s an ethernet port in case you don’t want to use Wi-Fi, and S/PDIF and aux ports for audio. There are also two HDMI 2.0 ports, bringing the total to three, and a USB port.
The remote is also welldesigned – and far less complicated than most other projector remotes, and bears a striking resemblance to the Nvidia Shield TV remote, with a circular directional pad and selection button in the middle, volume controls, and software controls.
Setup and software
Setting up a projector can be intimidating, but thankfully the CinemaX P1 walks you through most of it: When you turn the projector on for the first time, you’ll be guided through connecting to your Wi-Fi network and optionally creating an
Optoma account. Unfortunately, you won’t really be guided through much of tweaking the image of the projector, so you’ll have to do that manually when you’re done with the initial setup.
There are a few things to note about setting up the image of the projector. Using short-throw projectors like this can be tricky with projection screens, so you might want to consider either making sure you have a flat white wall, or buying a specialised taut projector screen like the ALR101 screen that Optoma sells. That’s because of the fact that average projector screens that you mount to the ceiling and pull down usually aren’t perfectly straight – and those flaws are amplified by a projector that’s so close to the screen.
Thankfully, if you do have a standard projector screen, you can use Optoma’s SmartFit geometric calibration tech to remedy some of those issues. The way it works is actually pretty smart – it relies on a smartphone app that connects to the projector through Wi-Fi, and calibrates the projection based on a photo that you take in the app. After using SmartFit, we found that the protection was far better fit to the screen we tested on, though there were still a few warps here and there that rendered the image a little imperfect. All that to say, use a completely flat surface if possible, or get used to a good, but not perfect, image.
Performance
The Optoma CinemaX P1 isn’t IMAX-grade, but it’s still relatively pricey in a world where the cost of 4K projectors is coming down. Thankfully, however, it delivers.
This projector is a DLP laser projector with a Texas Instruments XPR DLP chip built into it, which results in an excellent contrast ratio. It also means that the projector, natively, projects at 1080p, but uses pixel shift technology to ultra-quickly emit four times that in a way that’s invisible to the naked eye. Some purists may disagree, but the result is basically a 4K image.
In HDR, the image quality on this projector is stunning. Colors are deep and vivid, while black levels are actually pretty good. Projector technology just isn’t able to reproduce OLED-level blacklevels the same way an OLED TV can, and that may never happen – but as long as you’re aware of that going in, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
In HDR, you’ll get a number of image modes, including film, detail, bright, and standard. I ended up starting with standard mode and tweaking a few things from there, but ultimately, I was able to achieve a beautifully detailed image. That was especially true with content like David Attenborough’s Our Planet, which offered rich colors, while Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker emphasised the relatively deep black levels that you’ll get. The projector supports HDR10, but you won’t get Dolby Vision or HDR10+.
The Optoma CinemaX P1 actually has great speakers built into it, and while we still recommend upgrading to an actual sound system if you have the finances and the space, in a pinch you’ll still get decent audio quality without too many compromises.
The Optoma CinemaX P1 offers a good image quality and solid built-in sound. It’s let down by the sub-par software experience, but if you use a streaming box, that won’t matter. Christian de Looper