Epson Home Cinema 8100 Projector - Warranty
The Epson projector comes with a two year, parts and labor warranty. In additon, it includes Epson's replacement program for both years, which together, makes it a superb warranty.
While two year warranties are the most common found on 1080p projectors, a few projector models offering three, and a number of lower cost, entry level models offer only one.
As it turns out, this Epson is one of only a few under $2000 1080p projectors with a two year warranty. For comparison, Sanyo's similarly priced PLV-Z700 comes with three years, but no replacement program. Mitsubishi's new HC3800 has a standard 2 year warranty, and Optoma's new $999 projector comes with only one.
With Epson's replacement program, if your unit has a warranty covered issue, Epson will ship you a replacement, and you simply send back your unit to them, in the box the replacement came in. Epson pays all freight. Typically you are back up and running in 1 to 2 business days after contacting them. Hard to top that.
Epson also has a long established reputation for superior customer support. I base that on feedback from site visitors, but also from owning a large internet projector reseller for many years.
Epson Home Cinema 8100 Projector - The Bottom Line
To create the Home Cinema 8100 projector, Epson simply made minor improvements to the 6100 it replaces. The 8100 is not some great new projector, but really, the latest version of an already very good one. The Home Cinema 8100 has very good skin tones, very good black levels for a projector its price, and overall is a contender for best entry level projector so far this fall.
Better still, the starting price of the Home Cinema 8100 is $400 lower than the 6100 was a year ago. True, the street price of the 6100 has been falling, so the 8100 isn't much less today, but then, a newer, slightly better model for less is never a bad thing.
The Home Cinema 8100 is probably at its best as a projector for people wanting to watch both movies and other content, such as sports and HDTV.
With the Home Cinema 8100's brighter than average maximum lumens, the projector can deal with more than the absolute minimum of ambient light. Have a group over for football. You'll be able to enjoy the company in a reasonably lit room, not a cave like environment, and still have a bright, well saturated image. While a couple of other similarly priced projectors come somewhat close in maximim brightness, most quite noticeably less bright. Although the Home Cinema 8100 measured only high 1200s, we expect production units to measure a couple hundred lumens brighter, as that would be consistant with the older Home Cinema 6100 and 6500UB. There is no reason for the 8100 to be any less bright.
While I do think that the Home Cinema 8100 is a rather excellent projector value, I must confess to being just a little disappointed. I had hoped for a little more in black level performance. Yes, the 8100 can produce a blacker black, on the darkest scenes than the older 6100, but on the usual fairly dark scene, best I can tell, it may not be delivering a blacker black, or one only slightly better than the 6100.
My take is that Epson could further improve the iris action to lower the blacks in those scenes where there are bright areas, but not too bright. This is something Epson may find it's able to do as a firmware change, but we are talking a very slight difference. Certainly there is no flaw in their design, improving the blacks in that manner would also mean slighty more image compression, a trade-off.
Perhaps it's just I like seeing major advances, and Epson saved what significant improvements it has up its sleeve for the Home Cinema 8500UB, which when it ships, will sport new improved creative frame interpolation, and several other tricks. Well, perhaps that's why the new 8500UB is not less expensive than the old 6500UB, while the 8100 is less than the old 6100. More goodies, less price drop.
The Home Cinema 8100 is definitely one of the best sub-$2000 projectors we're going to see this year. Its predecessor, we rated higher last year, than a few other projectors including Sanyo's PLV-Z700 which are not being replaced this year.
