Mitsubishi HC-3000 Projector Review - Image Quality

Posted on July 1, 2006 by Art Feierman

also has a serial port and USB for "command and control". Lastly, the HC3000 also sports a 12volt Trigger jack for controlling a compatible motorized screen (most motorized screens have 12 volt control as an option, some versions standard. Lastly, there is a second IR (infra-red) sensor for the remote, and the power receptical.

The HC3000 vents hot air out the front, making it viable for shelf mounting in the rear of your room, if that should work for your situation.

The case is mostly silver gray, with the lens and some front trim (actually behind the grill) in black. As you can see from the image, the overall look is slightly sculpted with the top of the projector slightly higher in the center and lowering towards the left and right sides.

Of course, far more important than the physical looks, is how the image looks on the screen, so it's time to explore the Mitsubishi HC3000 projector's image quality.

Mitsubishi HC-3000 Projector Review - Image Quality

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The Mitsubishi HC3000 (link to specs), to out of the box, did not have overly accurate colors, and definitely can be improved by a simple (end user) calibration. With just a little tweaking, however the image quality, overall, becomes truly excellent. The need for a bit of color adjustment, is more common than not, with home theater projectors. The average user would probably find the out of box color to be enjoyable, but after properly adjusting it, it will simply be a better viewing experience!

I'll discuss some of the settings below in the calibration section, but for now, we'll start with images. These were shot with my digital camera, bracketing the exposure, then manually selecting the one that should (on computer screens) best reflect what the image looked like in my testing room. The room uses a Carada Brilliant White screen, an Oppo DVD player, a Toshiba HD-DVD player, and a JVC D-VHS HD tape deck. For all testing except from the JVC deck, the images were output digitally to the projector (HDMI or DVI, depending on the source). For the D-VHS deck component output was used. The Oppo was set to output 720p, the Toshiba and JVC - 1080i. As a side note, high quality Ultralink HDMI/DVI cables were used, and for side by side images, a Gefen HDMI splitter was used. Of course that is more than some of you really wanted to know, so let's get started.

Mitsubishi HC-3000 Color Accuracy and Flesh Tones

I've always believed that getting the flesh tones (skin tones, whatever) right is about the most important thing in terms of good color accuracy. If you have a bit too much yellow, you might have pale, sickly look, etc. After the basic calibration, the Mitsubishi HC3000 did a very good job on flesh tones as seen in these images.