Mitsubishi HC6000 Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance 4

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Art Feierman

HC6000 Projector Screen Recommendations

Considering the projector is about average in brightness - shy of 500 lumens when best setup for movie watching, the HC6000 is best with small and medium sized screens. No one should have a problem with a 110" screen, but my 128" Firehawk was a little too big for it. Now, my position is that you can use a larger screen if your walls are, compared with off white walls. So you can probably take the HC6000 up into the 120" diagonal range if you have a room with the darker walls, etc.

Now, to screen surfaces. The HC6000 has the improved black levels and that means you can get very nice results with a white surface, something with light gain, 1.1 to 1.4, such as the Stewart Studiotek 130, the Carada Brilliant White or other similar screens. The positive gain, gives you that little extra muscle for the larger screens too.

I, however spent most of my time viewing the HC6000 on my Firehawk G3, which is a light gray high contrast surface, and it looked great. I did keep the image size, though, to slightly over 106" diagonal, and that was a good match.

If you are going smaller screens - under 100" diagonal, the high contrast gray surface is probably the better match. And you should consider it up to 110" if you have ambient light issues where these HC gray screens help by not reflecting the ambient light back at you.

The point is, perhaps, once black levels reach a certain point, most screen types will do fine, and therefore you end up picking the screen that matches your room, and other viewing requirements.

HC6000 Projector Measurements and Calibration

Overall, the Mitsubishi HC6000 was definitely off the target of 6500K temperature in Cinema mode. With color temp at warm, it barely broke 6000K. And the medium setting jumped it to about 7000K, both missing by about the same amount.

The adjustment controls of the HC6000, work very well, and provide lots of control. My final grayscale adjustments weren't as good as my work with the HC4900, but then, there is a trial and error component, and I only spend so much time (about 20-30 minutes) on the grayscale calibration.

Measurements numbers


100 IRE	6922K
80 IRE	6566K
50 IRE	6557K
30 IRE	6437K

Further adjustment should be able to reduce the range of color temperatures down to about 200 from over 400. It's just a matter of patience. On the other hand, these numbers above are good. If you could compare a projector with this output with another, that was all 6500K, you'ld be hard pressed to spot any difference except in a side by side.

The adjustments made to accomplish


Contrast	Red= +1Green= +0 Blue= -7
Brightness	Red= 4Green= +3 Blue= 0

Contrast

Red= +1Green= +0

Blue= -7

Brightness

Red= 4Green= +3

Blue= 0

Fleshtones with these settings were very natural, and the overall settings, worked just great, as noted above.

There was the slightest yellow caste, and that reflects perhaps a touch too much green, and further playing should solve that as well.

HC6000 Image Noise

No issues here. Jaggies were not a problem, nor were most motion artifacts, when using the HQV 1080 test disk. I don't check the many cadences, but overall, no significant issue.