Epson Home Cinema 5010 Projector – Performance 3

Epson Home Cinema 5010 Sharpness

No changes – same lens, as previous years. Optics are not a problem. No sign of going out of focus after warm up. Pretty good center to edge sharpness with just a touch of softness at the edges if you focus on the center. It’s usually best to focus your projector 25% to 1/3 out from the center.

I’m wondering what type of system they are using with this “alignment” as it seems to blur things slightly. It may well be like the JVC projectors, claiming 4K resolution. Ultimately, you just can’t make true 4K without 4K of pixels, and those JVC’s don’t. Shifting softens the pixels, but blurs it slightly as well. BTW, I don’t buy into that whole 4K claim. It might allow you to feed it a 4K still photo, but ultimately, they are pixel shifting, and that isn’t the same as having real 4K – not at all. In fact, think of the 4K claim, as being more like, from a practical standpoint, claiming a 720p projector is 1080p, simply because it can take the 1080p and convert it down to 720p. It’s not exactly the same thing, but hopefully you get the idea. (At CEDIA, when demonstrating it on standard content, switching to 4k softened pixel visibility, and also softened the whole image. When I go “up” in resolution, I expect sharper, not softer.) But I digress, back to the Epson projector!

Nicely sharp. As usual, there are sharper projectors. A well designed single chip DLP projector has the advantage. With any three panel device, convergence is at least a small issue.