Epson Home Cinema 3020 Projector – Image Quality 4

Epson Home Cinema 3020 Projector: Performance, HDTV and Sports, including 3D

Football though, this time of year gets a large chunk of my 3D viewing, then there’s also those Discovery HD and similar type programs.

Note please:  Football images are all taken with shutters partially open, and rear lights turned on. All other HDTV images taken with minor ambient light.   (Below, first image gives you an idea of how the room looks with the lighting – which makes the image on the screen look overexposed).  The second one is exposed to make the screen look like it did when viewing. The lower pair:  ambient light hitting the screen with no projected image (same amount as when shooting the photos). Lower right points the camera to the back of my room.

pson Home Cinema 3020 Projector: Bottom Line on HDTV Sports, and also 3D HDTV content

A great HDTV and sports projector value.  Our other favorite from last year, the Acer, comes up dramatically short compared to this Epson HC3020 in terms of 3D brightness.

In terms of 2D HDTV, I’ve listed the only shortcomings I can think of:  The average black level performance, and the lack of CFI.  Since almost none of the direct competition offer CFI, that becomes sort of a moot point.  Black levels are far more important for your Blu-ray movie viewing than on HDTV, especially since blacks coming in on HDTV are already compromised compared to Blu-ray.

My bottom line for HDTV and Sports is:  You will either have to sacrifice a lot of brightness (expecially for 3D), or wait for some new projector to hit the market in this price range, to find a better choice than the Home Cinema 3020.

OK, you’ve seen enough images, time to give you a break, so we’ll talk brightness and other performance aspects on the next page.