Epson Home Cinema 3010 Projector – Performance

Epson Home Cinema 3010 Brightness

Lumen Output and Color Temp at 100 IRE:

Post Calibration: User 1 "best" mode = 1424 lumens

A true light canon, this Epson gets started when other projectors are already out of lumens. This means you have enough power to maintain a respectable image even with modest ambient light when watching a movie. Oh a really dark scene will take a big hit, but most viewing will be just fine.

Effect of zoom on lumen output (Dynamic mode)

The slight differences will be consistent

Realizing that a 1.5:1 zoom lens should lose less lumens going from wide angle to telephoto, than the 2.1:1 lens on some other Epson projectors, I was still impressed by the minimal drop in brightness across its range. The Home Cinema 3010 measured only about 7% lower at maximum distance, compared to the closest placement.

Home Cinema 3010 Eco-Mode vs. Full Power

Measuring Dynamic mode (all modes will behave the same), brightness dropped 35% (a bit more than most), to 1235 lumens, from 1925 lumens.

Uncalibrated Cinema 1 mode (our basis for “best”) still manages 923 lumens (we didn’t calibrate Eco-mode, which we noted already looked very good)! There is still plenty of brightness for movie viewing on even extremely large screens (over 130″ diagonal) or significant ambient light on a smaller screen. This lower 923 lumen number may also make some folks happy who don’t like their movies too bright.

Note, you do get a claimed increase in lamp life, from 4000 hours, to 5000 hours, when using Eco-mode.

Epson Home Cinema 3010 Pre-Calibration Color temp, Cinema Mode

Overall, with lamp at full power, the Home Cinema 3010, in Cinema, is warm – too much red. This corrects very nicely with calibration. Note, however, if you lower the lamp to low power – ECO mode, The color temp jumps dramatically and produces better color to begin with

It’s unlikely you’ll need Cinema mode (or the calibrated version, dropped into User 1) on high lamp, in most cases, for movies. Eco-mode should be more than bright enough for movie viewing. Therefore, if you aren’t going to calibrate your projector we strongly recommend Eco-mode for your quality movie viewing, for the slightly better color, and still be extremely bright.