Epson Home Cinema 5010 Projector - Image Quality

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Art Feierman

A lot goes on: The projected image -any shifts due to the camera, a Canon 60D professional dSLR, a Mac laptop for cropping and resizing, etc, using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, then saved "for web" (super compressed), and displayed with your graphics card, monitor, and browser all, further coloring the Home Cinema 5010 photos. In other words, they are useful only to a point, as colors are not going to be all that accurate. Rest assured, the Epson Home Cinema 5010 will look far better in your darkened theater, than these images on your computer monitor. Over all, the finished images in this case seem to have a slight reddish tint to them, that was not exhibited on the screen. It's very slight, but there when viewing on my MacBook Pro.

Epson Home Cinema 5010 Out of the Box Picture Quality

Click to enlarge. So close. Three of the four modes look pretty darn good for "right out of the box" Cinema and Natural are the two best choices for the best color. Both are a little cool, but short of calibrating the projectors, all you really have to do is slide the Color temp setting down from 6500K (displayed in the menus), to 6000K. If you like that one better, great. Either really is more than fine for the average viewer. For enthusiasts... pick one, or try our settings.

Click Image to Enlarge

Over all, Cinema has more of that "wow and pop" factor. Natural looks a bit "laid back" by comparison.

As is typical of all home theater projectors, the actual background is not evenly illuminated. Pre-production versions, such as the Epson 5010e we have here, tend to be worse. This projector generally is pretty good in this regard, but with a slight reddish tint to black, that shows up, primarily when I take heavily overexposed photos, demonstrating shadow detail or blacks. The red is a little more noticeable on the right side than the left.

All that said, when I described above that the Epson, in the photos is showing more pink/red, than is on the screen, that's a whole different matter related to the camera, etc.

One note. The Epson Home Cinema 5010 (and the other similar versions) all have a Cinema filter, as have all the 1080p Epson projectors before it, but one.

That one, is the new Epson Home Cinema 3010, Epson's entry level 3D projector at $1599. I mention because a reader just inquired how come the HC5010 loses about 2/3 brightness between "brightest mode" and "best mode", but the 3010 only loses about 25%?

The answer is surely that the HC3010 lacks the Cinema filter. Its drop from "brightest" - to "best" - is more in line with that of LCoS and DLP projectors which also have no "Cinema filter." If you want the best color from an LCD filter, it seems that almost all have such a filter, and that includes the Panasonic PT-AE7000 as well as these Epson projectors!