Acer Vero HL6810ATV review

From its compact rectangular shape and white finish, to its simple manual set-up tools and Android TV (rather than Google TV) smart system, there’s something a little old-school about the latest Acer projector to cross our test benches. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though.

In fact, it’s kind of refreshing to hang out with such a fuss-free, unpretentious projector – especially when that projector retains a more serious set of specifications than today’s portable projectors typically provide.

Add to this a couple of significant eco-friendly features in the shape of a nifty hybrid laser/LED lighting system and a chassis made from 50 per cent recycled plastics, and the unassuming-looking HL6810ATV has the potential to teach some of the new flash Harrys on the projector block a trick or two.

Price

At £1499 (around $2025 / AU$2825), the HL6810ATV sits at the affordable end of the 4K projector market. Take into account its built-in smarts, eco-friendly laser/LED hybrid lighting system, 240Hz refresh rate support and 4000 lumens of claimed peak brightness, and it has the potential to be a pretty serious bargain. Though, as we’ll see, you do have to accept a few compromises along the way.

Rivals for the HL6810ATV would be the Hisense PT1 if an ultra short throw projector would work for you, or Hisense’s What Hi-Fi? Award-winning M2 Pro if you’re looking for a more ‘lifestyle’ coffee table model with a convenience-focused design.

Design

The Acer HL6810ATV might not have the glamour or distinctiveness of many of today’s living room projectors, but it’s cute enough in its own throwback way.

Its small footprint and much lower stance than you get with the en vogue cubic designs currently dominating the living room projection market mean it scarcely makes any impact – positive or negative – on your decor, while its white finish is crisp and clean.

Its rounded-off corners give it a domesticated feel, and it’s nice to find it partnered with a remote control that also sports a white finish in harmony with the projector.

A full set of control buttons is provided on the HL6810ATV’s top edge for when you can’t find the remote, and a ‘window’ cut into the top edge above the lens barrel provides access to manual adjustments for zoom, focus and vertical optical image shifting.

Screw-down feet under the projector’s bottom edge help you get images in the right place on your wall or screen and, finally, the lens can be protected in transit by a little plastic lens cover attached by string to the projector’s underside.

Features

The Acer HL6810ATV is matter-of-factly described by Acer as a “4K UHD smart projector”, where the ‘smart’ bit refers to mini dongle-delivered Android TV support. Integrating a smart TV system proves right away that the HL6810ATV is aimed at the domestic rather than business market.

This position is backed up by such features as a Football Mode that exaggerates colours for more spectacular ‘big game’ nights, and gaming features that include support for 120Hz and 240Hz refresh rates and a Low Input Lag setting that gets input lag down to just 17ms at 60Hz. This lag pretty much halves each time as the projector moves through its 120Hz and 240Hz gears, too. These are all excellent numbers for a projector.

The HL6810ATV is built on a DLP optical system illuminated by hybrid laser and LED lighting. This relatively rare lighting approach has apparently been chosen by Acer because it delivers a longer lifespan (up to 30,000 hours is claimed if you stick with its Eco image setting) and uses less energy than other lighting systems.

The HL6810ATV adds playback of the HDR10 and HLG HDR formats to its 4K playback. There’s no support for the premium HDR10+ or Dolby Vision formats, with their extra scene-by-scene image data, but such support is relatively rare at this level, so that's no huge surprise.

Peak brightness from the HL6810ATV is claimed to be 4000 lumens, while contrast is claimed to be a very respectable 50,000:1. It’s highly unlikely you’ll experience either of these figures in the real world, but they’re still good numbers for the projector to build its picture performance on, hinting as they do at images capable of looking decent in both dark and bright room settings.

Also impressive for its money is how easy to set up the HL6810ATV is. The manual focus and zoom adjustment rings deliver a handy 1.3x level of zoom, while a little wheel adjustment above the lens and focus rings provides a degree of optical vertical image shift. There are options in the projector’s menus, too, to compensate for keystone errors and even the colour of your wall.

There’s no significant automated image set-up system of the sort we’re starting to see on many projectors, but given how many of those don’t work particularly well, we actually find the hands-on simplicity of the HL6810ATV’s all-manual picture set-up surprisingly welcome.

It helps on paper, too, that the HL6810ATV carries a built-in 10W speaker, to save you the trouble of having to find an external audio source wherever you’ve set the projector up. Though as we’ll get into later, this ostensibly helpful feature doesn’t quite pan out as hoped.

Being easy to set up adds weight to the HL6810ATV’s status as an unusually portable projector for anyone looking for a model that’s easy to move between different rooms or houses. Acer supplies a carry bag with the projector to further bolster its ‘go anywhere’ credentials.

The HL6810ATV’s connections include two HDMI ports (both 2.0b-specified, so there’s no support for 4K at any higher frame rates than 60Hz, or VRR); a 3.5mm mini jack audio output; an RS-232 control jack; and a 5V-out USB port that’s otherwise just for service use.

Unfortunately, we need to finish on a couple of significant limitations.

First, as well as being a bit buggy, the HL6810ATV’s Android TV smart system doesn’t carry any of the catch-up services for the main terrestrial UK broadcasters.

Second, while the Acer provides a pretty wide array of picture presets for SDR viewing, with HDR it frustratingly only offers a single preset mode, which you then have to manually adjust yourself in areas such as your preferred EOTF setting and Dynamic Black preference (there’s no true HDR tone mapping here, in case you were wondering).

Picture

The HL6810ATV can be really engaging to watch – so long as you’re not trying to do so in a bright room. It just isn’t bright enough with HDR or SDR, even in its brightest settings (which here means choosing the High setting of the ‘EOTF' feature), to punch through ambient light with enough conviction to keep colours looking bold, black levels looking solid and details looking defined. Quite where those 4000 claimed lumens have ended up is anyone’s guess.

While this lack of bright-room potency though will be enough to put off some buyers looking for an all-conditions all-rounder, the HL6810ATV is a more assured dark room watch than many projectors that try harder to punch through ambient light.

In particular, in a dark room, the projector delivers deeper and more convincing blacks and dark scenes than we had expected. This is particularly true if you use the Mid EOTF setting, which really does look startlingly cinematic for such a ‘casual’ projector.

Black levels are still decent, though, even if you switch the EOTF setting to High – which, in the end, you kind of have to, especially with HDR, if you want to stop significant amounts of faint detail in dark areas disappearing from view.

The High EOTF setting is also the only one where the HL6810ATV manages to give a sense that you’re watching HDR, as it enables the projector to deliver its highest ‘baseline’ HDR brightness level while still finding an extra gear to imbue the brightest HDR highlights with that sense of gleam and glimmer that’s so beyond what SDR can do.

The HL6810ATV handles colour very well for its money, too. Every now and then, a very bright shade, especially if it leans towards a secondary rather than primary colour, can become slightly washed out – as if the projector’s colour palette isn’t quite expansive enough to keep up with its brightness extremes (even though they’re not actually very extreme).

For the most part, though, colours look natural, nicely balanced against each other, and devoid of the sort of noise or lack of shading subtlety that can trouble some HDR displays (both TVs and projectors).

There’s no noise in dark parts of the picture either, and both HD and 4K sources look crisp and detailed without that detail being impaired by grittiness or moiré noise.

Judder, even with 24p movie sources, looks clean and natural enough to retain the clarity for most of the time as well, with only small movements of very detailed content sometimes looking a bit tweaky for a frame or two.

The HL6810ATV’s straightforward but natural and immersive presentation extends for the most part to its game performance. In fact, the relative starkness of graphics versus video sources makes them an even better fit for the projector’s engagingly no-nonsense approach.

The only rider is that for some reason graphics look noticeably coarser at 60Hz refresh rates than they do at 120Hz, even if the 60Hz images are 4K while the 120Hz images are (as they have to be) HD. Because of this, where the choice is available, we much prefer gaming at 1080p/120Hz than 4K/60Hz.

Sound

There isn’t really much to say here for the simple reason that there isn’t much sound to listen to. The speaker struggles to produce any volume worthy of the name, leaving the projector’s big, engaging pictures sounding like they’re being partnered with the audio equivalent of a peashooter.

There’s no bass, either, leaving action scenes sounding thin as well as quiet.

The only things stopping the sound from registering a single-star score, in fact, are the way the sound projects a little forward from the projector’s body to make it sound slightly more connected with the onscreen images, and the fact that dialogue always sounds surprisingly clear.

The reality is, though, that anyone wanting a sound experience that’s anywhere close to matching the impact of the HL6810ATV’s pictures is going to have to find some sort of external audio solution.

Verdict

The HL6810ATV’s lack of brightness limits its usage scenarios a little more than we’d like for a projector at this level. Its Android TV system is a bit dated, too.

You can always add a cheap HDMI streaming stick, though, and if you don’t mind using it in a pretty consistently dark environment and can pair it up easily enough with an external sound system, this Acer is actually surprisingly fun to use regardless of whether you’re watching a film or playing a game.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 2
• Features 3

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