Optoma UHD50

Affordable 4K projection, DLP-style

- Jeremy Laird

Let’s get one thing straight, with 4K clarity: The UHD50, one of Optoma’s latest range of 4K-capable projectors, isn’t a native UHD model. It’s a 4K pixel shifter. That means it uses a 1080p DLP chip, and “shifts” the image at high speed to create a full UHD pixel grid.

But there’s pixel shifting, then there’s pixel shifting. Optoma claims its take on it is superior. Or rather, it’s the pixelshifting tech from Texas Instruments, known as XPR, that’s superior to its main competitor, that of LCD projectors.

The idea is fairly straightforward to grasp: Project an image, then shift it slightly, and project it again with updated pixel data, but do it so fast the human eye perceives the result as a single, unified image. In really simple terms, you can think of LCD pixel-shift projectors as bumping the image once diagonally.