Viewsonic Pro8300 review

Getting the best picture from your home cinema projector often means plunging your room into total darkness. Not so with the Viewsonic Pro8300. Despite technically belonging to Viewsonic’s business range, this DLP projector shows a lot of promise for home cinema.

It has a Full HD (1,920x1,080) resolution and its 3,000 ANSI lumens lamp is roughly 1,000 lumens brighter than most other home cinema projectors. This means it can punch through daylight much more effectively, and we had no trouble at all using it in our brightly lit test room.

In fact, it was by far one of the best projectors we’ve seen when it came to watching films with the lights on, and our test footage was clear, sharp and full of colour even during particularly dark scenes. This makes it a much more attractive option for those who’d rather not shut off every light source every time they want to watch a film or even TV, but the Pro8300 isn’t without its faults.

It takes up a fair amount of space, but it also projects images quite high compared to other projectors. This is great if it’s just standing on your coffee table, but if you’d prefer to install it on a shelf, then you’ll need to make use of its height-adjustable feet on the back of the unit so you don’t end up with the picture being projected into the ceiling. There's plenty of choice for inputs with two HDMI, VGA, component, composite, S-video inputs and a single USB service port.

We found it difficult to find a good balance between its various preset colour modes. There are two individual User modes as well as settings for Brightest, Standard, Theatre and Dark Room, but all of them can be customised to your liking. Along with the brightness and contrast, you can adjust the colour saturation, tint, sharpness, individual colour values, gamma and personalise the colour temperature if its three dedicated options aren’t quite up to scratch.

We found that Standard produced the most natural colour configuration on its default settings, but its overall image quality seemed a little more washed out compared with other dedicated home cinema projectors. Its black levels, however, were some of the deepest we’ve seen, but this produced mixed results in practice.

Most of the time, the image was simply too black to pick out any of the finer detail, especially when the lights were turned off, and it made night scenes particularly difficult to watch. Changing the gamma helped to make the picture brighter and increase the level of detail in these dark scenes, but this also increased the amount of noise in the image, which was already a problem when the gamma levels were set to normal. Another issue we encountered was images becoming quite jerky during intense action sequences. Sadly, there are no menu options to help remedy this, and the noise reduction settings are constantly locked to Low.

This means the Pro8300 will be far more suited to some type of films than others. Darker, moodier films like Star Trek were almost unwatchable, but brighter, animated films like Ice Age 3 looked great. We were also pleased that there was only a very minimal rainbow effect when we moved our eyes across the screen.

It also has integrated 10W speakers, but we’d recommend connecting up a pair of dedicated speakers. Voices were clear and there was a small amount of bass, but overall the sound quality was quite tinny and there wasn’t really enough volume to fill a room.

The Viewsonic Pro 8300 is useful if you’re looking for a projector to use during the day that can double up for work use, but for pure home cinema the Optoma HD25 is the better choice.