Ultimea Thor T60 Review
Ultimea Thor T60 is a new ultra short throw projector that claims some of the best in the industry in both native contrast and brightness. With a claim of over 4000:1 native contrast and 4000 iso lumens, pair this with an ambient light rejecting screen and you could have a true tv replacement. But just how well does it do?
Initial Impressions
Right out of the boc and plugged in, I felt the projector had a prominent red shift. After making a few adjustments to it, everything came right into alignment. From then on, I was amazed at how bright and vivid the picture was. It blew all the other projectors I have recently tested out of the water. And what really impressed me was the shadow detail. Sometimes watching darker scenes on a projector can be difficult. But this handled them much easier than other projectors.
Shadow Detail
I really wanted to see how well it would do with shadow detail. For this I put on the movie Prometheus on blu-ray (SDR). This movie is very dark and has some scenes that can really blur the shadow detail together.
The Ultimea Thor T60 has an advance menu with a local contrast setting. After trying out the four different options, I settled on local contrast high. When I turned this on high, it really brought out the shadow detail. In fact it brought out more shadow detail then I had ever seen on any other projector. Including my high end JVC rs46u (which I show the head to head results in this video).
Daytime Viewing
In my theater room, I once again tested a normal projector (JVC) on a normal screen versus the Ultimea Thor T60 on a Vividstorm ambient light rejecting screen. The JVC was completely unwatchable as it was washed out. The Ultimea really surprised me. When I put it on the Vividstorm screen and turned the lights on, not only was it completely watchable, the difference with the lights on and off, were negligible. In fact, it would be hard pressed for anyone to see a difference.
I did also try this in my living room, which is more like a sunroom than most peoples living room. In there the blacks were noticeably gray, but the video was still watchable. It especially excelled on brighter content like sports and daytime television. It was really the darked scenes it struggled with. And if this really bothered you a couple blackout curtains would have made a huge difference.
3D
I have always said I will never get rid of my JVC< because it does 3D so much better than anything I have ever used. That was until now! The Ultimea is just as good if not better in 3D. It does do all the forms of 3D that I know, including 3D frame packing for blu-ray movies. The 3d has a lot of depth and dimensionality to it and there is no eye strain or ghosting that I have seen.
A few things of note. You have to turn on 3D setting in the projector. After you do that you have the option to switch your eye signal around. Basically it will switch the left and right eye signal if they are mixed up. Interestingly enough, my 3d glasses had to be switched everytime I watched a 3d movie.
After they were switched, the 3d image was amazing! I think a lot of that has to do with the brightness of the projector. As you may know the 3D glasses dim the scene you are viewing. So the brighter the projector the better.
Gaming
I am not a professional gamer or even a competitive gamer. However I do enjoy a game or two. Ultimea claims input lag from 10-25ms. Which is phenomenal. There are two ways to turn on gaming mode in the advanced menu. You can use the game mode or the auto low latency mode (ALLM). I tried both and was very happy with the performance. I don’t personally have a way to test the input lag. However I will say, I didn’t notice any lag. ANd it was really fun playing on a 100″ screen. Heck you can play up to a 150″ if you want to.
Final Thoughts
I have been very happy with this. In fact, I plan to redo my theater room to make this my main and only projector. If you are interested in getting one, back the Kickstarter now. By doing it now you lock in a lower price and have a 7 day return if for some reason you are not interested.
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