Epson Home Cinema 3020 Projector - Image Quality 3

Epson Home Cinema 3020 - Overall Color & Picture Quality

On everything but the darkest scenes where black level performance starts making a real difference, this Epson excels in terms of picture quality.  With or without calibration (or use of our provided settings on the Calibration page), color in best modes is really very good.

Just comparing "out of the box" performance, this Epson is certainly one of the best in the price range.  Dynamic mode, as is typical of most projectors, has a strong greenish caste but not as much as last year.  Mike's "quick-cal" settings make that Dynamic mode very watchable.  Or, for an almost as bright picture, there's the default Living Room mode. Epson's Living room mode is still brighter than almost any competing projector can muster in any of their bright modes, and the HC3020 is likely to look better than any of those competitors in their bright modes.

Note, while I have complained a bit about blacks (the images showing them to you are intentionally very overexposed), look at this normally exposed image of the Enterprise above.   Not bad, not bad at all.