Epson Home Cinema 1080 and Pro Cinema 1080 Projector Reviews - General Performance - 3

Epson Home Cinema 1080: Calibration

As usual, I did the basic minor adjustments to contrast and brightness, which in Theater Dark 1, were insignificant, and then I did a grayscale adjust to get the color temp as close to D65 (6500 Kelvin) temperature. For Theater Dark 1, is the only mode I adjusted. Not much to do. The Epson offers RGB Offset and Bias. I left the red, green, and blue offsets at 0, but reduced the red gain to -4, and green gain to +1. Here are the before and after numbers:

100ire (white) 6649K
80ire 6480K
50ire 6278K
30ire (very dark gray) 6077K

after adjustment:

100ire: 6779
80ire: 6625
50ire: 6571
30ire: 6481

Here are the color temp measurements (for white only - 100 IRE), for the other color modes:

Theater Dark 2: 100IRE: 6390 (note, this mode defaults to 6500K on the color temp setting. I did not try measuring it again, with the color temp set for 6500K, but would assume that it would jump by about 500K in the actual measurement.

Dynamic: strange results here, a surprisingly warm 6926K (usually I exect 8000K - 9500K in a brightst mode - close to what these types of lamps do best at). I should note however that the Dynamic mode is just dripping with excessive green (a good way to boost brightness). Thus, you have tons of lumens but they aren't that "pretty". I would conjecture, though, that you could get the green under control and produce a much more enjoyable image with only the cost of about 200 lumens from the measured almost 1700.

Livingroom, your day to day mode for HDTV, TV and sports, and fully able to handle some ambient light, measured at the default color temp of 8000K, and came up with a very close 8188, while dropping the color temp slide to 7500K brought the color temp measurement down to an similarly close 7588K.

Natural mode yielded a color temp of 6685K at 100 IRE, while
Theater mod - produced a color temp of
6660K at 100IRE
6703K at 80IRE
6789K at 50IRE
6680K at 30IRE

You can see why I didn't tamper with Theater mode. all four measurements within 130K, about as close as you will ever see, and since overall, the temperatures were only a minor amount cooler than the perfect 6500K, I figured "close enough".

Not surprisingly (based on my measurements with other projectors, there is a a color temperature shift going from lamp in high power to low power. Typically low power produces a cooler (more bluish) color temperature, than lamps working full out. The Epson is no exception. In Theater Dark 1, when I dropped to low power, the color temp increased (at 100IRE from 6649K to 7036.. You can see where having the color temperature slide, and lots of user memory settings can be really handy, for, if you are a fanatic, you might want to save different settings for high and low power for each of the color modes you decide you will be using.

Image Noise

Very nice. I brief run of the new HQV 1080 test disk (beta version), found no problems. General background noise was on the low side of typical, jaggy problems were basically non-existant, and I never felt the need to engage the motion noise filter, although I must admit, I spent almost all of my viewing time on hi-def DVDs and HDTV, and not much on standard TV and standard DVDs, so, it's possible that the noise filter might be handy for some content.

Overall the Epson did really well in virtually every catagory on this page... About my biggest complaint would be the inability to change the lamp without removing it from a ceiling mount.

OK, next is our only sort page, just a paragraph or two, on the warranties, which in this case are of particular note, since the Home and Pro versions have different warranties. Then on to the Summary, with our listings of Pros, Cons, and also typical capabilities. Go for it!