Epson Home Cinema 5020 Projector Calibration and Settings
Below are the calibration settings Mike ended up with in doing a grayscale calibration, and general settings. Although the Epson has a very good THX mode, if other HC5020's are consistent with this one, they can be slightly improved. See Mike's notes at the bottom regarding the finer points.
Dynamic mode is the brightest but with very strong greens. Reducing the green makes for a major viewing improvement, but the HC5020 UB still manages more than 1700 lumens!
10/21/2012 - Art Feierman
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For your convenience we repeat the Epson Home Cinema 5020's brightness and color temp measurements from the Performance page.
Let's take a look at the numbers:
Epson Home Cinema 5020 Color Temperature
Before we provide our settings, let's see what we started out with: Pre calibration, these are the color temperatures over the grayscale range:
Color Temp over IRE Range (Pre calibration):
THX
30 IRE – 7164
50 IRE – 7170
80 IRE – 7172
100 IRE – 7012
Here's a look at the other modes, just reporting on White - (100 IRE).
Lumen Output and Color Temp at 100 IRE:
Dynamic= 1890 @ 6702
Living Room= 1473 @ 8088
Natural= 804 @ 7132, 572 in Eco lamp mode (default)
Cinema= 804 @ 7041, 572 in Eco lamp mode (default)
THX= 804 @ 7012, 572 in Eco lamp mode (default)
Epson Home Cinema 5020 Basic Settings
In addition to calibrating Red Green and Blue for a correct grayscale balance (6500K), there are a number of other settings that come into play. Typically Contrast and Brightness (white balance and black balance), need to be done first. Color saturation and gamma also need adjustment. In the case of the HC5020 projector, most of these default settings were fairly close to ideal, with only contrast altered more than slightly in most modes.
Settings for measurements (default values are in parenthesis):
| Cinema | Dynamic | LivingRoom | Natural | THX | |
Contrast |
-2 | -1 | -1 | -1 | +1 |
| Brightness = (0) | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Color Temp = (0) |
6500 | 6500 | 7500 | 6500 | 6500 |
| Auto Iris | Off | High Speed | Off | Off | Off |
Color Saturation all settings 0
Lamp Mode=Normal (unless noted otherwise)
Auto Iris Off.
All other settings at default (untouched)
HC5020 Greyscale Calibration based on THX Mode, placed in User Memory 1
Color Temp over IRE Range (Post calibration):
20 IRE = 6719
30 IRE = 6515
40 IRE = 6474
50 IRE = 6539
60 IRE = 6503
70 IRE = 6509
80 IRE = 6564
90 IRE = 6528
100 IRE = 6517
Epson HC5020 RGB Settings
Below are Mike's adjustments for the THX and Dynamic modes. Again the goal of "best" is a great looking 6500K grayscale, and the goal of "brightest" is to improve a bright mode in terms of color accuracy, but without compromising brightness significantly.
HC5020 Post Calibration settings:
| Rec. 709 (Memory 1) | Quick Cal of Dynamic (Memory 2) | |
| Offset | ||
| R = 1 | 0 | |
| G = -3 | 0 | |
| B = 0 | 0 | |
| Gain | ||
| R = 0 | 0 | |
| G = 4 | -10 | |
| B = -6 | 0 |
Gamma: 2.2 2.0 (default)
Lumens: 678@6517 1706@7036
That covers the calibration data, except for CMS. More on that to be mentioned in my blog.
Mike's calibration comments: Overall, the 5020 is very similar in performance to the 5010. Lumen output is slightly higher in Dynamic mode with the 5020, but the biggest increase (169 lumens) is in the better picture quality modes (Cinema, THX, Natural). Grayscale is okay right out of the box and is virtually the same in THX, Cinema and Natural modes, with the correct red levels in the higher IREs, but it’s deficient in green and has too much blue. It calibrated extremely well (see graph), with Delta E under 2 for the entire range. This is an improvement over the 5010 we tested, which had a huge jump at 100 IRE as the red tapped out. The gamma settings are more accurate than they were with the 5010, with the average gamma coming in at only 0.02 less than the preset value (2.18 vs. 2.2). Similarly, setting gamma at 2.3 yielded an average gamma of 2.27. There are extensive gamma settings available, but, like the 3020e, the simple gamma setting is so good, most people won’t need to use them.
The Quick Cal of Dynamic reduces the green that’s apparent in whites, but it causes a rapid drop in lumen output and also starts to look too red with light grays. Living Room mode has a better picture and its output of over 1400 lumens is probably sufficient for most uses.
The color gamut is quite good by default in THX mode, with Red too high in absolute luminance and Green being off the Rec. 709 target mark. Blue was fairly good, but oversaturated. The secondaries were generally good, with only Magenta being noticeably off the mark in hue. Green and red couldn’t be completely moved into alignment with the CMS, but they were close enough and everything in normal viewing appeared accurate. Skin tones were better than the 3020, but the skin tone setting is subtle enough that if you think there’s a touch too much red, you can tone it down with that control.