Epson Home Cinema 5020 Projector Calibration and Settings

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Art Feierman

Below are the calibration settings Mike ended up with in doing a grayscale calibration, and general settings. Although the Epson has a very good THX mode, if other HC5020's are consistent with this one, they can be slightly improved. See Mike's notes at the bottom regarding the finer points. Dynamic mode is the brightest but with very strong greens. Reducing the green makes for a major viewing improvement, but the HC5020 UB still manages more than 1700 lumens! For your convenience we repeat the Epson Home Cinema 5020's brightness and color temp measurements from the Performance page. Let's take a look at the numbers:

Epson Home Cinema 5020 Color Temperature

Color Temp over IRE Range (Pre calibration): THX
30 IRE	7164
50 IRE	7170
80 IRE	7172
100 IRE	7012

Before we provide our settings, let's see what we started out with: Pre calibration, these are the color temperatures over the grayscale range.

Lumen Output and Color Temp at 100 IRE
Dynamic	1890 @ 6702
Living Room	1473 @ 8088
Natural	804 @ 7132, 572 in Eco lamp mode (default)
CInema	804 @ 7041, 572 in Eco lamp mode (default)
THX	804 @ 7012, 572 in Eco lamp mode (default)

Here's a look at the other modes, just reporting on White - (100 IRE).

Epson Home Cinema 5020 Basic Settings

In addition to calibrating Red Green and Blue for a correct grayscale balance (6500K), there are a number of other settings that come into play. Typically Contrast and Brightness (white balance and black balance), need to be done first. Color saturation and gamma also need adjustment. In the case of the HC5020 projector, most of these default settings were fairly close to ideal, with only contrast altered more than slightly in most modes.

Settings for measurements (default values are in parenthesis):