Epson Home Cinema 6100 Projector Calibration and Settings
We calibrate each home theater that is reviewed. It is a pretty standard calibration. We calibrated the Home Cinema 6100 for brightness, contrast, gamma, and grayscale. We do not use color management to adjust the properties of each of the individual primary and secondary colors. There's always more that can be done by some of the "hi-end" calibrators.
1/6/2009 - Art Feierman
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Epson Home Cinema 6100 Color Temperature
First, here are the color temperature measurements for the TheaterBlack 1 mode, right out of the box. Most impressive!!!
100 IRE (white): 6601K
80 IRE (light gray): 6548K
50 IRE (medium gray) 6490K
30 IRE (dark gray) 6515K
Here are our out of the box color temperature measurements for white, for each of the preset modes (repeated from the Performance section), (highlighted modes are the ones we performed some level of calibration on):
Theater Black 1= 6566K
Theater Black 2= 6248K
Theater= 7884K
Dynamic= = 6838K
LivingRoom= 8539K
Natural= 6783K
x.v.Color= 6449K
Epson Home Cinema 6100 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.
Our final settings (the default settings for Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Tint are all 0, in all modes): Mike made adjustments to these, and the Color Temp settings for each of the seven modes:
Contrast:
TheaterBlack 1: -2, TheaterBlack 2: -2, Theater: -1, Dynamic: 0, LivingRoom: 0, Natural: 0
Brightness:
TheaterBlack 1: 3, TheaterBlack 2: 1, Theater: 1, Dynamic: 1, LivingRoom: 1, Natural: 1
Color Saturation:
TheaterBlack 1: -3, TheaterBlack 2: -4, Theater: 0, Dynamic: 10, LivingRoom: 10, Natural: 0
Note: The high saturation for Dynamic and Livingroom are for dealing with significant ambient light.) Back off these numbers, as needed. For most of my viewing, in LivingRoom, for sports, for example, I set saturation to 2 for modest ambient light.
Lamp Mode: High Brightness (full power)
Dynamic Iris: Off for measurements, on for movie watching, off for sports...
All calibration work was done using HDMI sources, we did not attempt to also do Component Video or other source modes.
Zoom is set at mid-point for all measurements. All other settings at default
We recommend you save all your changes to the User memory modes. There are plenty of them, and you can rename them to suit.
Home Cinema 6100 RGB Settings
These are the adjustments we made to Red, Green and Blue for the grayscale balance, for the three modes we calibrated. Please note, we refer to the work we do on LivingRoom and Dynamic modes as "quick calibrations". The goal there isn't a perfect picture, allowing for some compromise, for a brighter image when needed.
TheaterBlack 1:
Gain: Red -6, Green 0, Blue -8
Offset: Red -10, Green 0, Blue -2
Color Saturation: -4
Tint: -8
Gamma: 2.4
LivingRoom:
Gain: Red 8, Green 0, Blue 12
Offset: Red 10, Green 0, Blue 0
Color Saturation: 0
Tint: 0
Gamma: 2.2
Dynamic:
Gain: Red 10, Green 0, Blue 14
Offset: Red 8, Green 0, Blue 18
Color Saturation: 0
Tint: 0
Gamma: 2.2
The Bottom Line Brightness: Post calibration:
TheaterBlack 1: 675 lumens
LivingRoom: 2051 lumens
Dynamic: 2032 lumens
Note, other than TheaterBlack1, adjust Color Saturation and Gamma to best meet your viewing conditions, in terms of ambient light, and your general viewing preferences.
Finally, here are the post calibration color temp measurements for TheaterBlack1 mode:
100 IRE: 6591K
80 IRE: 6487K
50 IRE: 6533K
30 IRE: 6508K
That folks is about as tight as a grayscale balance gets, with only a range of 121K, centered very close to the ideal 6500K.
The end result is accurate color throughout most of the brightness range.
NEXT: Recommended projector screens for the Epson Home Cinema 6100