Epson Home Cinema 3010 Projector - Physical Tour-2

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Art Feierman

Epson Home Cinema 3010 Lens Throw

As previously noted, the Home Cinema 3010 and 3010e have a manual 1.5:1 zoom lens. That makes the placement range pretty good, even if not as wide a range as the 8350.

For a 100 inch diagonal 16:9 screen the front of the HC3010 can be as close as 9.7 feet, or as far back as 15.7 feet. (2.96 - 4.78 meters).

The 9.7 feet is very typical. Most projectors except for the fixed lens ultra or very short throw projectors, have a closest distance for that size screen, of between 9 and 12 feet. This projector just can't sit as far back from the screen as some others designed to also be able to be rear shelf mounted (like the 8350). Projectors without lens shift aren't suitable for rear shelf mounting normally, although it can be done using keystone correction, if the measurements work.

Lens Shift

No lens shift for the Epson Home Cinema 3010, so mounting properly is critical if you don't want to have to use keystone correction (which does very slightly degrade the picture).

Let's talk about that for a second. I received an email or blog comment recently, asking "how bad is using keystone correction". I have an easy way to describe that for existing projector owners: Any softness caused by using keystone correction, is going to take away less from picture quality, than the compression being used on satellite and cable transmissions. So, while we cringe at the thought of using keystone correction, it's not going to do something drastic, like make a 1080p image seem as soft as a 720p one in terms of sharpness.

On Blu-ray disc, you should be able to see a slight difference between keystone on, and off. It will be harder to see on lower quality sources.

By definition the keystone correction compresses each line of data differently, but there never should be highly visible artifacts from today's keystone adjustment formulas