Epson Home Cinema 2030 Projector - Image Quality 5

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Art Feierman

Epson Home Cinema 2030 Projector: Bottom Line on HDTV Sports, and also 3D HDTV Content

A great HDTV and sports projector value. Our other favorite from last year, the Acer, comes up dramatically short compared to this Epson HC2030 in terms of 3D brightness.

In terms of 2D HDTV, I've listed the only shortcomings I can think of: The average black level performance, and the lack of CFI. Since almost none of the direct competition offer CFI, that becomes sort of a moot point. Black levels are far more important for your Blu-ray movie viewing than on HDTV, especially since blacks coming in on HDTV are already compromised compared to Blu-ray.

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My bottom line for HDTV and Sports is: You will either have to sacrifice a lot of brightness (expecially for 3D), or wait for some new projector to hit the market in this price range, to find a better choice than the Home Cinema 2030.

Below - a little Coldplay, anyone?

Below is an image from the Superbowl, shot with Dynamic (default settings)

And this one below, same image shot with Living Room mode:

Notice how much more dynamic looking and how much more pop the Dynamic mode offers. Then remember, that we shot all of these other HDTV images except that one using the less bright Living Room mode (even though Dynamic is better at cutting through the ambient light we allowed in the room). Also of note, Dynamic above was with default settings. On our Calibration page, we have Mike's "Quick-Cal" which further improves the picture while costing less than 10% of maximum brightness!