Reviewed by Ian Carling, director at Fusion LX
Where have you used this product?
We’ve installed a few projectors at Alton Towers theme park as part of the Galactica virtual reality roller coaster last year. We’ve also recently used them at National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket and deployed five at the World Rugby Museum in Twickenham in the UK. We’re often working with the ZU650, including our very next project.
Why did you choose it?
We’ve work with pretty much every manufacturer there is. We generally specify projectors depending on the project and don’t have any preference with regards to when we go to different distributors to find something.
I think the Optoma ZU650 was one of the first laser projectors offering this level of brightness on the market, so obviously it was very useful for us as we are often working on installations in museums and similar environments.
What do you like about using it?
Installing something that doesn’t require maintenance is a big plus point for us. In the past we’ve installed projectors in lots of museums and visitor attractions and we will leave instructions on aftercare for the projectors which is quite crucial for staff to follow (i.e. cleaning out filters). And sometimes it just doesn’t happen. For example, we did an install at Manchester Library about four or five years ago with projectors that needed to be cleaned quite regularly and they didn’t and unfortunately every single projector failed at the same time. Obviously sometimes maintenance of projectors is last on a client’s list of things to do, so allowing them to be able to get on with other things is quite important.
Plus the price point understandably matters as well, and it is a good price for the performance you get from the projector.
The range of lenses is pretty much perfect. Probably 99% of times we’ve used this projector we’ve used the 0.8-1.0 because it’s quite crucial for us for getting a projector close to where it’s projecting working in the museum space. Its full HD too – everything we do now needs to be minimum full HD and the brightness of it being 6,000 lumens is important for us.
It’s also very quiet, which again is crucial for us.
What would you change about it?
It is quite big, but obviously to get a certain quality of performance requires a projector to be big and relatively heavy. So it being smaller in size would be better, but it is small compared to its other options that’s for sure.
And then we’d also change the price obviously, but that’s about everything. There are things we would change if we could, but then there’s nothing else in the market that does what we would change it to, so overall we’re pretty satisfied.