Home Cinema 710HD Projector Calibration and Settings
7/19/2012 - Art Feierman
|
|
For your convenience we repeat the Epson Home Cinema 710's (click for specs) brightness and color temp measurements from the Performance page
Let's take a look at the numbers:
Epson Home Cinema 710HD 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:
Theatre Mode (Lamp high, Auto Iris off):
30 IRE – 7646
50 IRE – 7262
80 IRE – 6948
100 IRE – 7205
The Epson Home Cinema 710's colors," right out of the box" are definitely a bit "cool". Ideally, the numbers should be around 6500K which has more red in the balance. Overall, reds will be a little thin, but overall, movies and general content look pretty good, comparable to many LCDTVs in their better, or best modes. With our settings recommendations you should have more accurate and better balanced color than you can expect from most LCDTVs, unless you have them calibrated.
Epson Home Cinema 710 Pre-calibration
Basic Settings
Recommended settings for measurements (default settings in parenthesis):
Dynamic Living Room Theatre Game
Brightness= (0) 2 3 2 1
Contrast = (0) -5 -3 -2 -3
Color Temp= (Medium for all)
All other settings at default (untouched)
Auto iris off
Lamp on Normal Unless otherwise noted
Epson Home Cinema 710 Post Calibration Grayscale:
Color temp over IRE range (post calibration):
20 - 7369
30 - 6925
40 - 6690
50 - 6589
60 - 6601
70 - 6543
80 - 6488
90 - 6422
100 – 6832
Average gamma = 1.97
Gamma's a bit low (brighter mid tones), but that's rather handy if there's ambient light present. 2.2 is ideal, but 1.97 should be just fine.
Home Cinema 710HD Greyscale Calibration
Here are Mike's comments and the charts his calibration gear produces (for you technical folks):
The RGB global controls work pretty well for such a low priced projector. Delta E is under 3 from 20-90 IRE, which is quite good. By default, there is too much green in each mode (especially Dynamic), which, of course, is where the high brightness comes from. Increasing red and cutting green helps a lot with Theatre mode, but the inexplicable lack of a Color saturation control means you have to put up with a little too much red in skin tones. There’s no gamma control either, but that’s not unusual in this price range. The Quick Cal of Dynamic shows that just reducing green by only 2 steps drops the lumen output almost 10%. It does take a bit of the green edge off everything though. The color gamut is hit and miss, with green (which is unusual) being very accurate, but red and blue are off. Cyan and magenta are off, but yellow is right on.
Overall, it looks pretty good for the price and brightness. Just wish there was a color saturation control.
Home Cinema 710HD RGB Settings
Below are Mike's adjustments for the Theatre and Dynamic modes. Again, the goal of "best" (Theatre in this case) is a great looking 6500K grayscale, and the goal of a "brightest" mode is to improve a bright mode in terms of color as it relates to watchability, but without compromising brightness too much.. Afterall, technically, with any projector sporting a full color management system, you should be able to calibrate any mode, and at the end of the day, all those properly calibrated modes will be almost identical, including brightness.
HC710 Post Calibration settings:
| Theatre | Quick Cal of Dynamic (on User 2) | |
| R = 0 | R= 0 | |
| G = -2 | G= -2 | |
| B = -1 | B= 0 |
Lumens at 100 IRE: 1581 @ 6832 in Theatre - 2270 lumens with our "Quick-Cal" settings for "Brightest"
In just 3 or 4 minutes you can enter the menus of this Epson, drop in all our recommended changes, and save both our Best, and Brightest modes in two of the User memories. It's that easy to get even better color than the Epson Home Cinema 710 produces "right out of the box".
NEXT: Recommended projector screens for the Home Cinema 710HD Projector