While Acer’s cute new projector doesn’t do anything spectacular, it’s a decent enough movie and gaming all-rounder for its money
- Solid all-round picture quality
- Fun big-screen gaming option
- Compact, portable design
- Not as bright as expected
- Flimsy integrated audio system
- Dated smart system
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4K Hybrid optical system Texas Instruments' XPR technology combines pixel shifting with fast flashing of DLP technology’s mirrors to deliver 4K pictures
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4000 lumens claimed maximum brightness The Laser/LED hybrid lighting system is claimed to deliver 4,000 lumens of maximum brightness
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Built-in Android TV smart system The HL6810ATV carries an integrated Android TV smart system
The Vero part of the Acer Vero HL6810ATV’s name indicates that it’s part of Acer’s self-styled ‘eco-friendly’ product range, boasting a chassis made from 50% post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastics.
Worthy though this certainly is, the HL6810ATV’s £1249 asking price will need to also come with some decent performance chops to make the value add up.
Cue promising HL6810ATV claims of a 50,000:1 contrast ratio, 4,000 lumens of max brightness and support for 240Hz gaming from a hybrid LED/laser light system – claims that raise the prospect of the HL6810ATV being a true room condition and content type all-rounder.
- Small coffee table-friendly footprint
- Crisp white finish
- Manual zoom, focus and image shift adjustments
The HL6810ATV’s small 304 x 226 x 119 (WDH, mm) proportions and simple rectangular shape feel like a bit of a blast from the past in today’s ultra short throw, cubic or cradle-hanging projector world.
There’s no harm in keeping things simple and compact if you’re focused on the sort of casual lifestyle room situations that Acer seems to be targeting with this projector – especially when its small form is appealingly dressed in a crisp white finish with gently rounded corners.
The top edge features both a fairly fulsome set of control buttons for those times when the remote just won’t fall to hand, and a window cut out above the lens barrel providing access to manual zoom and focus rings, as well as a vertical image shift adjustment wheel.
Given how potentially portable its small shape makes it, it’s nice to see Acer shipping the HL6810ATV with a free carry case.
- Ships with straightforward remote control
- Android TV via included dongle
- Voice search commands supported
The most obvious and likely most used way of controlling the HL6810ATV is the provided remote control. This is a pretty basic plastic design with rubbery buttons, and doesn’t feature any backlighting. It’s comfortable to hold and pretty easy to learn your way round, and I appreciated it being finished in white to match the projector.
As well as providing some attractively designed and ‘busy’ menus for setting up the picture and sound, the HL6810ATV carries the Android TV smart system. Or at least it does if you slot the provided Android TV dongle into the provided jacks on the projector’s rear.
Android TV is a little primitive compared with Google TV smart system now used in the majority of smart projectors. Its visual presentation is a bit cluttered and its app support is relatively limited. In particular, I couldn’t find any of the catch up apps for the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters.
The Android TV implementation does enable searching for content by voice command, though, as well as enabling you to stream content to it via Google Cast.
- Two HDMI (2.0b) ports
- 1080p/240Hz gaming support
The HL6810ATV seems hell bent on trying to be all things to all people.
I’ve already mentioned how its design is intended to appeal to the eco-friendly market, but its unusual hybrid LED/laser lighting system also ticks the green box by delivering both a longer working lifespan (up to 30,000 hours if you stick with the projector’s Eco mode), and more brightness for less energy consumption. In fact, Acer claims its hybrid approach makes the HL6810ATV 48% more efficient than a regular lamp projector.
The HL6810ATV’s 4000 lumens of claimed peak brightness raises hopes it could be used in a regular daytime living room environment rather than always having to be partnered with a blacked out room, while the claimed 50,000:1 contrast ratio suggests it may also be able to adapt itself handily to dark room movie nights.
Then there’s a Football picture preset (which enhances colour saturations) for the sports fans, while gamers can play in 4K/60Hz with HDR, or with frame rates up to 240Hz if they don’t mind reducing the resolution to Full HD without HDR.
There’s no support for variable refresh rates, but input lag even at 60Hz is only 17ms with the projector’s Low Input Lag mode active – an excellent result by projector standards.
The HL6810ATV is also small and cute enough to be left on a coffee table permanently without ruining you decor or, as its supplied carry bag reminds you, portable enough to be easily moved between different rooms, or taken around friend’s homes for big-screen party nights.
It’s not just its compact design and included carry bag that make it a good portable option, either. Handy set up features such as 1.3x optical zoom and vertical optical image shifting make it easier and faster to set up than some similarly affordable 4K projectors.
The HDR support I’ve mentioned a couple of times is limited to the HDR10 and HLG formats; the HL6810ATV won’t play either of the Dolby Vision or HDR10+.
The HL6810ATV doesn’t carry multiple HDR presets. There’s just the one core HDR mode, which you can tinker with using such features as Dynamic Black and, especially, an EOTF low, middle or high adjustment that essentially lets you choose between overall brightness and detail in the brightest areas. Not surprisingly for its money, the HL6810ATV does not carry an HDR dynamic tone mapping system for constantly optimising HDR images to the projector’s capabilities.
Switch to SDR playback and the HL6810ATV offers up picture presets galore, including Movie, Rec 709 and Dark Cinema options. Every preset offers a genuinely different look to pictures, though one or two of them don’t feel well suited to their names. The Dark Cinema setting, for instance, is actually brighter than the Movie setting. But overall these presets had me wishing that Acer had offered a similar wealth of options for HDR.
The HL6810ATV is reasonably well connected for its price. Two HDMI inputs lead the way, both built to the HDMI 2.0b standard. This HDMI spec means the projector can’t take in 4K / 120Hz, but the level of gaming support is pretty decent for such an affordable projector, as discussed earlier.
Other physical connections comprise a connection for attaching the Android TV dongle; a 3.5mm audio line out; an RS-232 control port for system integration; and a 5V service use USB port.
As we’re increasingly coming to expect with a modern lifestyle projector, finally, the HL6810ATV is equipped with a built in audio system – in this case a single 10W speaker..
- Not the brightest images
- No motion processing
Provided you’re careful how you set it up, the HL6810ATV can be a lot of fun to watch. No matter what you want to watch on it.
With HDR, after lots of toing and froing, I settled on the High EOTF setting as being pretty much essential to getting the best pictures from Acer’s projector. In this mode images look as bright as the HL6810ATV can go – which matters because despite the 4000 lumens of claimed peak brightness, the HL6810ATV’s real-world pictures aren’t actually very bright.
This core limitation finds both the low and middle EOTF HDR settings not only looking rather dull, but delivering some slightly unnatural colours, and crushing out some shadow details during dark scenes. The Medium EOTF image can actually look the most cinematic at first impressions, with its combination of good black levels and rich colours, but those colour and shadow detail issues ultimately deliver too many distractions for you to truly settle into an immersive film or TV show experience.
So while black levels are a bit shallower in the high EOTF setting and the occasional bright colour can look a bit faded, it’s the most consistent and natural setting overall – and the only one that gives much of a sense of the difference between HDR and SDR.
In fact, the high EOTF setting is more natural and balanced overall than the HDR images of many rival affordable 4K projectors.
Talking of 4K, while the HL6810ATV’s 4K playback isn’t truly native in the traditional pixel for pixel sense, the HL6810ATV’s 4K playback looks crisp and clean, without looking forced or gritty.
There’s no motion processing on the HL6810ATV, but the sharpness holds up well too with 24p movie viewing, even during camera pans and action scenes. The projector also generally handles judder quite well, leaning more towards 24p’s cinematic effect than excessive judder that draws too much attention to itself.
Small movements of highly detailed content, such as a bobbing head as an actor walks towards the camera, can look slightly uncomfortable, but for the vast majority of the time the HL6810ATV’s motion handling enhances rather than detracts from its image’s no-nonsense approach.
As well as being mostly natural in tone, the high EOTF setting’s HDR colours also avoid losing subtle detail in the brightest areas, or succumbing to tonal ‘clumping’ and coarseness during dark sequences. There’s no noise over areas of fine details either, and no serious banding over subtle colour blends.
In fact, aside from the occasional slightly wan colour tone, the high EOTF HDR mode’s only potential distraction is some mild rainbow effect (fleeting stripes of red, green and blue over bright highlights or in your peripheral vision). This is limited enough, though, that only people extremely susceptible to seeing it will likely be regularly bothered by it.
The HL6810ATV is a good all-round SDR performer too, especially if you use the nicely balanced Movie preset. As you might expect after my HDR comments, SDR doesn’t look very bright on Acer’s projector. But it’s balanced, detailed, and backed up by some credible black levels for a projector of the HL6810ATV’s type.
It has to be said that measurements taken using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and a Klein K-10A don’t show the HL6810ATV to be especially accurate in its SDR presentation.
Even if you choose the provided Rec 709 picture preset, Saturation Sweep, Luminance Sweep and Colorchecker tests generate DeltaE 2000 average errors of 14.36, 13,76 and 12.23 respectively – some way above the 3.0 threshold below which errors are generally considered imperceptible to the human eye.
Acer’s projector fares much better with a multi-point greyscale SDR test, recording a DeltaE 2000 error of just 3.88 that backs up my subjective impressions of its good eye for subtle shading and shadow detail reproduction. And really its colour results aren’t actually shockingly bad at all for such an affordable and practical projector.
The HL6810ATV records broadly similar levels of DeltaE 2000 Average errors in HDR mode, regardless of whether you have the EOTF setting set to high or low, while colour gamut measurements find the HL6810ATV covering more than 95% of the Rec 709 spectrum, and a quite respectable 84% of the DCI-P3 spectrum used in most HDR mastering.
The HL6810ATV’s engaging video chops if you choose the right settings are backed up by a surprisingly enjoyable gaming performance – again provided you set it up right. Gaming on Acer’s projector always feels responsive and tight thanks to the low 17ms of input lag, and there’s a nice balance of contrast, colour and brightness on show at all times.
Graphics tend to look a little coarse at frame rates of 60Hz or less, though, to the extent that I’d say it’s worth sacrificing HDR and resolution in favour of a 1080p/120Hz feed if your game source supports that.
- Lacks scale and power
The HL6810ATV is very much an audio solution of last resort. It can’t get very loud at all, and what sound it does produce is tinny and one dimensional, with precious little mid-range or bass to round it out or give it scale.
It does make a vague effort to project its sound forward from the projector’s bodywork, to help it sound a bit more connected with the visual action. Vocals sound crisp and intelligible, too, despite the lack of volume.
Overall, though, the HL6810ATV just can’t deliver anything like the sort of scale or power of sound required to partner its king-sized pictures with a similarly cinematic sound. In fact, it struggles to drown out its own cooling fan noise…
Should you buy it?
Provided you’re using the Movie preset with SDR and the High EOTF setting with HDR, the HL6810ATV provides crisp, natural, nicely balanced images that are consistently easy to watch and become immersed in – whetherr you’re watching a film or playing a game.
Not bright enough for daytime use
Despite the claimed 4000 lumens of peak brightness, the HL6810ATV isn’t bright enough to comfortably support use in anything other than a fairly dark room.
Provided a) you can live with it not delivering pictures punchy enough to be usable in a regular daytime living room setting and b) you don’t mind making a couple of adjustments to its picture set up, the HL6810ATV’s performance in a darkened space is engagingly clean, punchy, and contrast-rich.
It also delivers 4K sources with more sharpness and detail than you’d expect for its £1249 price, and provides a refreshingly responsive gaming experience too.
It’s just a shame it can’t back up its likeable pictures with better sound quality and a more comprehensive and up to date smart system.
The Acer HL6810ATV was tested over two weeks with HDR and SDR content. Image quality was checked objectively with Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software and G1 signal generator, plus the Klein K10-A colorimeter.
- Tested for two weeks
- Tested with real world content
- Also tested with industry-respected objective testing equipment
The HL6810ATV only plays the HDR10 and HLG formats. There’s no support for Dolby Vision or HDR10+.
The HL6810ATV is a DLP projector, capable of playing 4K sources using Texas Instruments’ XPR technology. It uses a hybrid light system that combines laser and LED lighting – a solution that’s claimed to reduce power consumption without sacrificing brightness.
While it’s not, as hoped, bright enough or powerful enough with its sound to be considered as a straightforward big screen TV alternative, it’s still a convenient, affordable, fairly easy to set up portable projector to be got out and used as and when you want to watch a film, watch a sports event or indulge in a big-screen game night.
| Acer HL6810ATV Review | |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Acer |
| Size (Dimensions) | 304 x 226 x 119 MM |
| Weight | 3 KG |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| Resolution | 3840 x 2160 |
| Projector Type | DLP projector |
| Brightness Lumens | 4000 |
| Lamp Life | 30,000 hours in Eco mode |
| Max Image Size | 300 inches |
| HDR | Yes |
| Types of HDR | HDR10, HLG |
| Ports | Two 2.0b HDMIs (one with ARC), RS-232C port, optical digital audio output, 3.5mm audio line out, 5V USB service port |
| Audio (Power output) | 10 W |
| Colours | White |
| Display Technology | DLP |
| Projector Display Technology | Laser DLP |
| Throw Ratio | 1.15-1.5 |
| UK RRP | £1249 |
| USA RRP | TBC |