Epson Ensemble HD 1080 Home Theater System Review: General Performance

Epson Ensemble HD 1080 Overview
Image Quality
General Performance
Installation
Summary, Pros, Cons

There's lots to cover in this section. These links will allow you to quickly get to any topics of interest to you.

Epson Ensemble HD 1080 Menus
Epson Ensemble HD 1080 User Memory Settings
Ensemble HD 1080 Remote Control
Lens Throw and Lens Shift, Pixel Structure...
SDE and Rainbow Effect
Epson Ensemble HD 1080 Projector Brightness
Epson Ensemble HD 1080 Light Leakage
Epson Ensemble HD 1080 Audible Noise Levels
Ensemble HD 1080 Calibration
Projector Image Noise
Sound Quality
The Cool Other Features

Ensemble HD 1080 Menus

I've got to keep this simple. After all, this is a complete system, not just a projector. I will refer you back to the original Home Cinema 1080 review for the menu layout and controls of the projector. The menus are unchanged, they are well laid out, from a logical standpoint, and easy to navigate. I've always considered Epson to have one of the best menu layouts, and that is still true. The Epson image and color controls are extensive, including individual controls for primary and secondary color tuning. (For example, as part of our calibration, we significantly reduced the saturation of the green channel.)

That brings us to the menus that come up from the Ensemble's A/V Controller. The first image displayed is the Audio menu. Besides bass, treble, and mid-range (voice), you have adjustment for the surround sound. Below that are the distance settings mentioned, which are designed to optimize the audio channels to give you the best surround sound for where you are sitting. It seems to work well!

Video menu: As you can see, very basic items here. These, I do believe, relate strictly to the AV Controller, and affect the signal before it goes out to the display device.

There is also a Language menu, which lets you set, of course the language for the menus, but also for DVD menus, even subtitles.

 

The Preference Menu has but one item, and that is to toggle off or on, the Midnight mode, which is discussed later on this page. That pretty much covers the AV Controller's menu, except for the Reset menu, which is pretty obvious.

 

Ensemble HD 1080 User Memory Settings

Well, in reality, the User Memories are for the projector, and accessible from the projector's menus. The projector offers nine separate user savable settings, more than enough for even those who love to fiddle around. Most projectors have 3 settings, and I think that providing five or six, is actually enough for 99 point something of all owners. Nine may be over the top, but, then, why not have them? afterall, the difference between 3 and 9, is just a bit of firmware!

By the way, Epson doesn't provide any naming ability for the user memories, they just take on the name of the Color mode, thus you see a modified Theater Black 1, a Living Room, and two Dynamics. The first dynamic was Mike's original setup. My instructions to Mike since he started doing my calibrations for me a few months ago, is to "tame" dynamic type modes, if the colors, contrast, etc., are far enough off to produce visibly poor colors and skin tones. Mike and I aren't on the same page yet. He tends to over correct, getting better picture quality than I'm looking for. Afterall, Dynamic is there for dealing with rooms with too much ambient light. You need a bit of oversaturation, etc. Mike ended up with far less lumens than the default. The second Dynamic listed in the User area, was my work, starting with his settings, and putting back more ambient lighting "punch" and recovering more lumens. (Even that setting is still "better" and dimmer, than what I was looking for, and I'll no doubt tweak that for even more brightness, as the picture is still "almost perfect", and can be compromised, and still offer a really good image for brighter rooms.

Ensemble HD 1080 Projector: Universal Remote Control

This is tough for me. I am not, by any means an expert with universal remotes. At the most, I've barely dabbled, and still haven't put one in my main theater (when I finish some work, I will buy one, but have Mike program it, since that's an area of his expertise). For those familar with a lot of programmable remotes, this is the Universal Remote Control, model MX-350. It is, as is typical for programmable remotes, a large remote, for, of course it has a display screen and a lot of buttons. The remote can handle up to 10 devices, so you have plenty for other toys you might add to the system.

I'm going to concentrate on the organization and system functionality of the provided remote. I'll cover most of what it can do, with the out of the box setup, and what an owner might want added to that.

Keep in mind that Epson's goal, here, is to keep everything simple. In the basic sense, they are very successful. One touch lowers the screen, fires up the projector and you are ready to go. (A second press of the power button is necessary to drop the screen all the way down, but this can be easily changed.)

On the other hand, if you want to change the projector's settings, they still provide you the standard Epson remote for the Home Cinema 1080. I would have liked to see much of that programmed in, and will at least, add the ability to select different user memories (and/or standard color presets) from the universal remote. With just those added to the system remote, needing the Epson remote would be rare, if at all!

I haven't yet added the cable/DVR box to the programming. (Plenty of codes for such things are in the Epson manual). As a result, I don't know the extent of control of the cable box functionality, that will be added to the universal remote. I expect, though, it will provide all the day to day control that anyone will need for both the signal side, and the DVR's controls. There is one menu item on the remote for Cable, and another for DVR, so it makes sense that there will be plenty of remote capability.

As you can see from the lower image (the full remote), the universal remote is a fairly large one. It has a not overly large, but decent sized lcd display, and lots of well organized buttons. A large button on the side of the remote, to the right of the display, when pressed, backlights the LCD display, and the buttons with blue LED light. Plenty of light for dark rooms.

The image to the right shows the Main menu, page 1. As long as Main is selected, pressing On or Off, controls powering up/down, the AV/Controller (including audio, internal tuner and DVD player), the screen, and, of course, the projector. From the Main menu you can select any of the devices pre-programmed in, or added to the remote's functionality. There are two pages of choices (second page is showing) from the main menu, and a single touch of the appropriate button to the right of the display, engages that device.

Thus, when I press HD (first page of the main menu), it switches the source to the one defined for the HD option, in my case, my Sony PS3. Pressing Cable, then changes the source to my Cable box. You get the idea. If extensive programming is in place for these devices, some of it will appear when you bring up that devices screen, but many or most of the control will simply be that the buttons on the remote will start working for that device. For example, if I have DVD selected, I can now navigate and control the internal DVD player - ejecting, playing, going forward/back chapters, fast forward/reverse, etc. I'll assume that when I have the cable box configured, I'll have the ability to bring up the guide, change channels, etc.

As you can see, the remote has lots of buttons, the disc pad area will be used for many devices, and menu navigation. You can see the usual controls for DVD players, etc., around the disc pad. Of course, they know you are going to want to have some form of TV/HDTV hooked up, so there is a full numeric keypad at the bottom, and of course volume and channel up/down rockers just above the disc pad. Also of note, is an Info button, as well as the Menu and Esc buttons. For your cable/satellite, there is the usual Guide button to bring up the channel guide. Other buttons include a Mute, and the absolutely necessary (for channel surfers) Previous Channel button

Of interest. The volume works regardless of which device you have selected on the remote's screen. From a "what I learned immediately" standpoint, if you are not in Main (the AV Controller) the Off button won't power down the system. Just hit the Main button (in between the Off and On buttons).

You get the idea. As I indicated, this "universal" remote, is from Universal Remote Control, who happens to be one of the biggest names in programmable remote controls.

Review continues below this advertisement.

Ensemble HD 1080 Lens Throw and Lens Shift

Lot's of range on the best in class, 2.1:1 zoom lens. As noted on the first page, measured from the front of the lens, the projector can be as close as 9.8 feet and as far back as 20.9 feet from the screen!

When you consider the size of the projector, in its cradle, approximately 16 inches to the nose of the lens barrel, from the back), and add that to the minimum distance of 9.8 feet, you end up with approximately 11 feet, 4 inches, to the rear. The screen of course will be a few inches out from the wall, so lets say you will need your room to be at a minimum, just over 11.5 feet. Sorry, you won't get it to work in one of those 9x10 feet 3rd or 4th bedrooms, just not quite enough depth.

By the same token, if you want to set up a mount from the rear wall, your maximum room depth becomes about 22 feet.

All considered, the projector should work in the vast majority of rooms, and a tape measure will tell you for sure!

Lens shift is excellent. If you have really high ceilings - say 12, 15 or more, or high sloped ceilings to ceiling mount you will still need the assembly to hang down from a pole, like many projector installations. Because of the great range, though, the top of the projector cradle can be ceiling mounted, with any extension, on ceilings as high as 10 or 11 feet, with no issue. (Of course the height you choose to place the screen will factor into that. I've got the screen mounted to the wall, just below the ceiling, and with a 9 foot ceiling height, I still have a good amount of vertical lens shift available.

The logic involved in the paragraph above: In my installation, the center of the lens is two and a half inches below the bottom of the screen housing, and therefore just less than ten inches above the top of the screen surface when the screen is fully down. Since the projector has almost 23" inches "above the line" of lens shift, for a 100" diagonal screen, I could still be ceiling flush on a 10 foot ceiling, and if I had a taller room, and mounted the screen higher as well, no problem. However, there is a limit of how high up you want your screen. You can also still wall mount the screen below the projector, but adjust the drop of the screen to show less than the full foot of black drop material that is normally above the screen surface. That buys still another foot, making 11 foot ceilings fine! Again, with an extension you can do rooms with taller ceilings

The Epson also has horizontal lens shift. using it more than the smallest amounts (to correct for slightly off center mounting), reduces the amount of vertical lens shift. In the case of my installation, Because of wall mounted cabinets near where the projector was to be mounted, I requested that they mount it off center, intentionally, and correct with the horizontal lens shift. In my case, to give you an idea, with the lens almost flush with the top of the screen (2.5 inches below) I was still able to mount the projector/cradle with the lens about 4 inches off center, and still have lens shift to spare.

Ensemble HD 1080 SDE and Rainbow Effect, Pixel Visibility

A classic 3LCD projector. At normal seating distances, you will likely only ever see pixel structure on things like closing movie credits, and maybe some of the signage used in to display scores when watching sports, and similar things. I do not consider there to be a screen door effect issue, with this system. Since the projector is not a DLP projector, there is no spinning color wheel, and therefore Rainbow Effect does not exist.

Ensemble HD 1080 Projector Brightness

Overall, in "best" mode, the Epson is very typical in terms of brightness, but is brighter than all but a few projectors when comparing "brightest" modes. To keep things simple, in best mode, Theater Black 1, after calibration, brightness was just over 12 foot-lamberts for the provided 100" diagonal screen size. 12 foot-lamberts is the standard for movie theater brightness at your favorite cineplex, so the Epson is right on the money, for your darkened theater. Other modes give you more brightness if you prefer, a slight compromise in color accuracy.

In brightest mode, though, the projector has plenty of lumens to cut through a moderate amount of ambient light, that you probably prefer, for viewing things like sports and general TV/HDTV viewing!

For those who want more understanding, regarding the technical side of the brightness aspect of the Epson, read on, but if you are the typical family that Epson is targeting, suffice to say, brightness is just what you are looking for. Good brightness for best movie viewing, and brightness to spare, in the brighter modes, for dealing with ambient light!

Every calibrator does things a bit differently, and Mike who just did the Epson projector for me, while I watched him (since I wasn't going to have him unmount it to take to his place). He tends to get slightly lower numbers post calibration than I do, the way he does things. Still, his numbers show good brightness in best - Theater Black 1 mode, and the Epson is still extremely bright in best mode, compared to most projectors even though there are a few that significantly out power the Epson.

With the lamp on full power, as most will use it, I suspect, and the zoom lens a little closer than the midway point, just over 1/3 back from its closest, here are the numbers for each of the Color modes. In addition I have included the measured color temperature of white (ideal for movies is 6500K):

Theater Black 1= 358 lumens @ 6656           
Theater Black 2= 240 lumens @ 6611
Dynamic= 1422 lumens @ 6954
Living Room= 617 lumens @ 6673
Natural= 369 lumens @ 6718

For "best" mode, the Epson's default 358 lumens in Theater Black one is really just about average for the lower priced (under $4000) home theater projectors.

For "brightest" mode, the 1422 lumens makes the Epson Home Cinema 1080 projector significantly brighter than most under $10,000 home theater projectors, but, as mentioned there are a few much brighter models out there (all more expensive).

To give you an idea about the relative difference between the brightness of different modes, here are three images - taken with the same camera exposure, to show you the brightness differences. So that the brightest mode isn't overly blown out, obviously the darker modes look dark. Of course at the correct exposure for each, they would all appear equally bright in the photos. (So, don't try to make any judgements about color from these images.)

Above: Theater Black 1, Below is Living Room, bottom image is Dynamic mode

As you can see, there is a substantial, real difference in brightness, especially between Theatre Black 1, and Dynamic

More importantly, here are the brightness measurements, post calibration, for the four modes that we calibrated:

Theater Black 1 = 349 lumens
Living Room = 610 lumens
Dynamic (Mike's settings) = 1157 lumens
Dynamic (Art's settings) = 1303 lumens, or about 13% brighter than Mikes

The Epson has a low lamp power mode as well, which extends lamp life to 3000 hours. This will cost you approximately 24 percent of brightness. I found it to be a little dark for my taste, in best mode, but many will find it just fine when in Living Room or Dynamic modes. Remember, over time, the lamp will dim, so even those who find low lamp power to be fine, will likely switch to high power as the lamp approaches about 2/3 to 3/4 of its rated usage.

Review continues below this advertisement:

Ensemble HD 1080 Projector Light Leakage

No real issue here, the Epson leaks a little (very little) light through the lens, not enough that I noticed even once, during normal viewing!

Ensemble HD 1080 Audible Noise Levels

The Epson projector has never been considered a very quiet one. It has more noise (fan noise), than most other 3LCD projectors, but is still quieter than the typical competing DLP projectors. When you have a very quiet scene, you might notice the fan noise (certainly if "listening for it", but only hard core enthusiasts do that). Let's just say that when my air conditioning or heating is running, the noise coming through the room's vent is louder than the projector.

Again, an enthusiast might object, but the vast marjority will never consider audible noise to be an issue! As a side note, the Epson projector's fan noise, is less, I believe, than the Sony PS3's that I use as a Blu-ray player.

 

Ensemble HD 1080 Projector: Measurements and Calibration

OK, if you are going to have your dealer calibrate the projector, you need not concern yourself with this. If you are going to buy a calibration disc, like AVIA, or DVE-HD, again, you don't need this section, but might want to use it for comparision, also plugging in these numbers and comparing your work, with ours.

For anyone not paying to have the projector calibrated, I strongly recommend you take our settings, and plug them right into your projector, and save them in the multiple user memory areas.

With a little help from the manual, you should be able to figure it out, and accomplish inputting and saving our settings, in about 15 - 20 minutes. You will definitely appreciate the difference, as color handling goes from good, to excellent!

For the settings we came up with, first, here are the resulting color temperature measurements - for movie watching, once again, 6500K is ideal. For watching things like sports many prefer a slightly cooler (less red - more blue) image in the 7000K - 7500K range.

Epson Home Cinema 1080 Post Calibration Measurements:

Theater Black 1:

White (100 IRE): 6704K
Light gray (80 IRE): 6546K
Medium gray (50 IRE): 6437K
Low gray (30 IRE): 6368K

That's not the tightest color calibration (a range of less than 200K is generally phenomenal), but the Epson's total range of only 336K is still excellent, and perfectly centered around the ideal 6500K.

Now for what you will need, if you want to plug in our settings:

Theater Black 1 mode:

General picture settings :
Brightness = -1, Contrast = -1, Saturation = 0, Tint = 2
Skin Tone = 3 (Depending on the content you are watching, if you want to fine tune skin tones if you are watching something that isn't just right, you might find 4 to be better, and on rare occasion, 5, but these are minor shifts in color.
Color Temp 6500K

That brings us to the RGB settings. This is the heart of any calibration. You'll find this area in the Image menu, select Advanced, and select RGB.

Offsets: Red= -20, G= 18, B= -3
Gain: Red= 2, G= -11, B= -1

After you have put in the settings, ultimately you will want to go to the Memory menu, and do a Save Memory. Bingo, done! Well, actually you'll probably want to create 3 or 4 user memories, I'd suggest using our Theater Black 1, Living Room, and the second of the Dynamic settings (mine), for three total.

Living Room Mode:

General settings
Brightness = 0, Contrast = -1, Saturation = -2, Tint = -4, Skin Tone 4, Color Temp 8000K

RGB settings:
Offsets: Red= -13, G= -3, B= -0
Gain: Red= 17, G= -13, B= -21

Dynamic (Art's settings - a very quick calibration):

General settings
Brightness = 1, Contrast = -3, Saturation = -3, Tint = 1, Skin Tone 4 (or 5), Color Temp 7000K

RGB Settings
Offsets: Red= 0, G= 0, B= 0
Gain: Red= 20, G= -7, B= 2

Mike's settings look the tiniest bit better, but can't cut through ambient light as well. To try those, use the same as above, but change the Green gain to -20, and the Blue gain to 0.

Need a little more punch than even my settings, up the contrast and saturation slightly. It won't give you any more lumens, but the higher saturation won't wash out the colors as quickly. I find my settings are just fine though, even with a fair amount of ambient light, as seen in this image from Olympic beach volleyball. Room has three of four 85 watt recessed lights turned on. The room still looks much darker than it is (that's our normal room lighting for working in the office), because the projected image is so bright:

Ensemble HD 1080 Image Noise

Epson uses good processing on their projector. There's better out there, but don't worry about it, some of those better processors cost more than this projector. There are no significant issues with jaggies, motion artifacts, and general image noise. Good processing is, well, good! And definitely good enough. Until you've seen a projector a few generations ago, and some of the image noise problems they had, you just can't appreciate how clean most of today's projectors are. I've been tempted for at least a year, to kill off this paragraph, but every once and a while a good projector comes along where image noise is still a problem (most recently, BenQ's otherwise, very good W5000, has serious image noise). I digress - don't worry about the Epson!

Ensemble HD 1080 Sound Quality

Before I get started: As a reviewer of home theater projectors, in one sense, I'm out of my depth a bit, analysing sound quality of the complete system. On the other hand, my "mispent youth" (my twenties), consisted of managing several very high end, and esoteric audio shops around the US (California, Delaware, Pennsylvania/New Jersey). Let's just say, that I know what good, and great sound systems sound like. On the other hand, it's been a long time, and my hearing just "ain't what it used to be".

I'm still into phenomenal sound, and my main speakers in my theater (left and right) are the same IMF Reference IV speakers I bought in the early 70's, by the way, back then, they cost about the same as a Porche 911s. Those, along with my high end tube components cost about as much as a small house back then, and the speakers may well still be comparable to some of today's $50,000 speakers.

Now that we have that out of the way, keep in mind that your room will have a lot to do with the final sound. Epson seems to think, based on their volume spec, that the Ensemble HD should be comfortable in rooms of at least 3000 cubic feet (if I did the math right, approximately 85 cubic meters). They report the system can hit 105 db, in that sized room (they provide no further specifics).

My room is smaller - measuring roughly 17 feet deep, by 10.5 feet wide, and 9 feet high.

When I crank up the system for movies, the room rocks. We are talking the same kind of volumes as in a typical movie theater when handling all those special effects. When I pop in a music video of a good rock band, it won't match the loudest bands I've heard live, but has enough volume to chase most people out of the room.

The ported 10 inch sub-woofer provides plenty of "shake the house" bass.

The combination of the three front speakers located in the projection screen housing, and the two rear surround sound speakers, truly suceed in providing room filling sound. It's everywhere!

And, get this, if the subwoofer doen't shake your room enough, the AV Controller is already set up to handle a second subwoofer. All I can say to that, is "how thoughtful of them."

Ok so what we have is generally an audio system that has the muscle, it has plenty to spare for me, in my room.

Quality of the sound:

This is where I get into trouble. I'm so spoiled by the nearly perfect accuracy, the flawless soundstage images, and clean (down to sub-sonics) bass of my primary system, that when listening to music, that I fear anything I say may give you the misconception that I have a problem with the Ensemble HD's audio. That certainly isn't true.

I come from a audio perfectionist standpoint. If you think I'm picky about home theater projectors, you have no idea how insane I was about music perfection, for many years. I'll bet you never listened and hand picked vaccuum tubes (for my old tube pre-amp), nor listened to different (multi-hundred dollar) phono cartridges on indentical turntables to see which sounded the best. OK you get the idea. (By the way, I'm presuming most of you know what turntables, phono cartridges, and vaccuum tubes are.) (When I mentioned phono cartridge to my teenage daughter, I got a blank stare from her.)

From an audiophile perspective, the system is respectable for high quality music reproduction, but no more than that. I mean it sounds better, probably than 96% of the population has ever owned, especially when you add in the fact that it is a good 5.1 surround system, not that "old fashioned" (but still better in many ways) stereo. From what little I know of Atlantic Technology, the folks that partnered with Epson for the audio, they are definitely very good at 5.1 systems, and I believe I have heard that their 'sweet spot" is around $1000 - $2000+ for a full surround setup (just the 5 speakers, + powered subwoofer, but not including a receiver). And that's about what I think we have here. I've heard $1000 and $1500 Home theater in a box systems (including amp and DVD), and this pretty much blows those away.

Getting critical, I find the bass to be a bit muddy, in the higher ranges of the sub-woofer (I will eventually see if I can tweak it a bit), and that does detract from mid-range detail. Highs are solid but lack the razor sharp precision really high end speakers can produce. In all fairness, a big, muddy bottom end (bass) is the stuff that gives you that movie theater type of room rumbling sound, so that can be a good thing for your movie watching.

Oh, don't worry, before the movie comes on, when they put on that DTS or Dolby audio demonstration, crank it up, your friends will just drop their jaws.

Don't get me wrong, I've listened quite a bit to music on the system in this past week and change, including a few music DVD's on Blu-ray (Moody Blues, Yes, Incubus, Led Zepplin, etc.) I can definitely live with the overall sound quality.

When it comes to the mid-range itself, for those into the whole audiophile thing (which, of course this product is NOT designed for), it seems a little peaky. As I said, I'm rusty when it comes to analysing speakers but there does seem to be a peak in the upper mid-range. It's there, but not really bad, it is just enough, that I can notice that a male vocal has a slightly different tonal quality than on my main system. Don't worry, Elton still sounds like Elton, Justin Hayward still sounds like Justin, and so on.

Overall, the sound system is a blast. No question about it. The experience was - well, a great experience!

The audio is not comparable to a $10,000 audio system, but then that would be too much to ask for. I use a THX receiver (I miss those much better sounding tubes), in my main system, for amplification, and, hey, most full THX receivers cost $3000+ to begin with.

What we have here, is an audio system that really does complement the video. Together, on movies, it's a rather spectacular combination considering the overall cost. If you are a music purist, guess what, you'll probably get by just fine, unless you are the type willing to spend more on audio, than this whole Ensemble HD costs!

BTW, if I really did have a very large bonus or family room, say 3000+ cubic foot, I just might be tempted to add that second subwoofer (single homes only - definitely no condos/apartments). My room is a little more than half that size.

Other Cool Features of the Epson Ensemble HD 1080

I've touched on some of these before, the goal here is not to overlook some of the things the Epson Ensemble HD can do, that might not be obvious.

Midnight Mode: You've got to love this feature. Understanding that there comes a time of the day, when you can't crank up the system to levels you would like, midnight mode comes to the rescue. With midnight mode engaged, bass is reduced somewhat, and both highs and lows are compressed, so that the the loudest passages, are not as loud, but the low and middle volume range aren't reduced as much. This takes a bit of the punch out of the music (or movie's sound), but is a better solution than, perhaps, just lowering overall volume which typically makes quieter passages, and instruments too soft to enjoy. Good job!

Multiple formats accepted by the DVD player. I listed them all on the first page of the review, but want to make the point, that the system can handle most user burned CDs, and one (DVD-R) recordable format. It also can play assorted files off of data CDs like .jpg, and .wma.

The USB port on the front. Perfect for playing some computer files (.jpg again, for example), as well as just popping in the memory card from your digital camera.

Headphone Jack! Brilliant! Life isn't fair, for, sometimes we have families or neighbors and can't crank up the system. Even midnight mode might not work for you. Switch to headphones, it's not as much fun, but, better than listening to an action movie at 1/3 of normal volume.

AM/FM tuner: Of course it's nice to have them. What's nice, is that if you plan to use the tuner, that the system allows you presets so you can quickly find your favorite stations. (No, the tuner is not an FM-HD tuner.)

Preset screen drop: I've also mentioned this. It allows you to determine how far down the screen comes, and that can be invaluable in getting your screen height exactly where you want it. Those people with "front and rear rows" of seating, typically want the screen a little higher, so the folks in back can see better.

Additional Radio Frequency capabilities: The Ensemble HD 1080 remote system (RF) works great, but what to do if you have other components that are infra-red, and you want them behind doors. The Ensemble will support RF base stations, so that their remote can handle those infra-red devices that can be converted to radio frequency. (A specialty, I believe, of Universal Remote Control, who makes the Ensemble remote.)

Epson Ensemble HD 1080 Overview
Image Quality
General Performance
Installation
Summary, Pros, Cons