LG HS102 LED Projector Review

Today I received my two LG HS102 projectors. These are DLP based projectors that use LEDs for their light source. This will be an ongoing review of the projectors.

Projector setup notes (March 25th, 2009)

LG HS102 ProjectorI couldn’t find any of these projectors for sale in the USA so my units were shipped directly from Korea. This meant that the units came with Korean instructions, a power supply that didn’t have a cable for USA electrical outlets, and a remote control with Korean characters.  To get it working here in the USA I did the following:

  • download the English instruction manual in PDF format
  • adapt the power supply for USA 3 prong electrical outlets
    • I used the cable that connects to my Drobo power supply, to connect to the LG power supply
      • But I checked the voltages first! The power supply supports 100V-240V AC input
      • The power supply outputs approximately 19.8V DC
      • I’ll post a photo of the power connectors eventually, but the cable is fairly common (my Sony VAIO VGN-Z has the same cable type, as does the previously mentioned Drobo)
  • changed the projector’s language to “English” (see pg. 24 in the manual)
  • learn the layout of the remote control (see pg. 9 in the manual)
    • the Korean remote control appears to have the exact same layout as the English remote control, the buttons are just labeled in their respective languages

Remote control for the the LG HS102 projector

The projectors were very nicely packaged and even included a carrying case.

Image Quality Impressions

So far I am impressed with the projected image quality. Brightness is good, colors are saturated and the image is sharp. The one drawback so far is that the large screen size (80+ inches) could really use more resolution than 800×600. Pixels begin to become evident when they are shown on such a large scale.

However, my eventual strategy will be to use TWO of these projectors to create a 1600×600 display.

Noise: fairly quiet, it does have a fan (as do virtually all projectors if this ilk) but it doesn’t impede movie watching

Motion blur: appears to be slightly more prevelant that the Mitsubishi PK20 LED projector

Image size: the projector is rated at 80 inches but tonight Samantha and I used it at 82 inches with no ill effects

Screen used: we’ve simply been projecting directly onto our wall, with color adjusted to “cool” in order to compensate for our non-white wall. Eventually I may get out my dedicated projector screen, but so far the wall is working very well.

Sample content

So far we’ve watched an episode of Seinfeld and an episode of Police Squad (the TV precursor to the Naked Gun movies). Seinfeld looked good but the low-res nature of the source file was evident when viewed at 82 inches. The 4×3 aspect ratio of older TV shows really works well with this projector.

Misc notes

The projector can play Divx movies via a USB storage device. However, the USB device needs to be formatted as FAT32 (NTFS is not supported).

Conclusion

Not ready for a final conclusion, but I am impressed so far.

More to come, this is just from the first night :-).

Other reviews

  • Review by PocketLint
    • My take on this review:  One of the first reviews up on the web for this projector. The review doesn’t delve into image quality enough for my taste, nor the advantages of LED projectors over traditional bulb projectors. However, their overall impressions are valid and it’s nice to see a high-traffic site reviewing the HS102.

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