Mitsubishi HC7900DW Home Theater Projector Review

Mitsubishi HC7900DW Projector Highlights

Mitsubishi HC7900DW Projector Overview

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The Mitsubishi HC7900DW is relatively small for a home theater projector. The HC7900 DW is the middle of the Mitsubishi home theater projector lineup.

In the Mitsubishi projector line-up, the HC7900DW is straddled by their new LCoS based HC8000D projector on the high end of performance, and the rather vintage (now under $1500) HC4000 on the low. The HC9000D won our Best In Class award last year, we have yet to review its replacement, the new HC8000D.

Other than the HC7900DW projector's shift from black case to white, the hardware is basically the same.  Same lens, same inputs...Beyond that, however, there are a number of improvements, as one would expect. (If not, they could have just called it the HC7800DW instead of the HC7900DW.) Contrast is upped to 150,000 from 100,000, as an example.

The 1.5:1 manual zoom lens, has a pretty good zoom range for a home DLP projector. That provides you with more placement flexibility than most of the DLP competition, and allows the HC7900DW projector to compete with most LCD and LCoS projectors in terms of placement flexibility.  Of course that statement is only true because it has vertical lens shift, as do all the competing 3LCD projectors anywhere near it's price, including the Epson Home Cinema 5020 ($2599) and the Panasonic PT-AE8000 ($2999), which are almost certainly the two best selling over $2000 home theater projectors.

This is a fairly well equipped projector.  The Mitsubishi HC7900 has creative frame interpolation for smooth motion.  It also offers a full CMS (color management system) for calibrating the projector.

The HC7900DW comes with a remote control, which I think is rather dated, but it will be discussed in the Remote section of the Tour page (the next page).  When it comes to audible noise, DLPs tend to be a bit noisy.  The HC7900 is not a real exception to that tendency, but it is a bit quieter than most DLPs.  It does get fairly quiet in its low power setting.  I find it to be slightly quieter than the Epson HC5020 when comparing  both at full  power.   Considering the big lamp life difference between full and eco-mode, if the bucks are tight, you'll want to run in eco-mode.

Mostly though, what's important is the picture. We will discuss that a great deal, in the following pages, but I did want to say, that the HC7900DW exhibits the overall picture quality - the look and feel - that has, over many years, had a lot of people preferring DLP projectors.

Let's take a closer look at the Mitsubishi HC7900DW.