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Epson Home Cinema 3010 Projector Calibration and Settings

Posted on October 18, 2011 By Art Feierman

The Home Cinema 3010 projector engineering sample we received was calibrated by Mike. When the second, production projector arrived, I tried Mike’s settings and they still looked good, give or take minor lamp variations. As a result, we have published Mike’s settings below, and decided not to do a fresh calibration on the production projector.

Our calibrations, including the Epson Home Cinema 3010, are normally limited to a grayscale calibration, along with brightness, contrast, color saturation, tint (where applicable), etc. Only in very special circumstances will we calibrate the individual colors, in which case we discuss why.

Epson Home Cinema 3010 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, best mode - Cinema)
Cinema  Cinema (in Eco lamp)
30 IRE 5873 6741
50 IRE 6036 6836
80 IRE 6128 6815
100 IRE 6166 6849

A quick fix for the low / warm temp in Cinema mode at full lamp, is to adjust the color temp from its default 6500K to 7000K. That makes a real improvement, short of a real calibration.

Lumen Output and Color Temp at 100 IRE
Dynamic 1925 @ 6852
Living Room 1602 @ 7633
Natural 1402 @ 6155, 923 @ 6912 in Eco lamp mode (default)
Cinema 1402 @ 6166, 923 @ 6849 in Eco lamp mode (default)
Auto 923 @ 6704

I pretty much ignored the Auto mode. I like to know where I am, mode wise. Some folks will be perfectly happy using it.Most movies cause it to drop into Cinema mode, etc. Besides, I like the Living Room mode, the way I have it set up, a lot better than Dynamic, and it’s not that much less bright. I mean I still have plenty of brightness when desired or needed.

Epson Home Cinema 3010 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 this Epson most of these default settings were fairly close to ideal.

Settings for measurements (default values are in parenthesis)
Cinema Dynamic Living Room Natural
Contrast = (0) 0 0 -1 0
Brightness= (0) 0 0 2 1
Color Saturation= (0 for all)
Tint= (0 for all)
Color Temp (default) 6500 6500 7500 6500

Auto Iris is on Normal by default.
All other settings at default (untouched)
Auto picture mode has none of the above adjustable settings as it uses its light sensor to switch to whatever picture mode works with the ambient light conditions.
Zoom at mid range and Lamp mode on Normal unless noted otherwise.

Epson Home Cinema 3010 Projector – Performance 4
Epson Home Cinema 3010 Projector Calibration and Settings 2