Epson Home Cinema 5050UB Review – Performance: Brightness, Sharpness

* Digital Cinema and Cinema modes use Epson’s Cinema filter to improve color (out to P3), but at the cost of a good 40% of brightness when engaged compared to other modes without the Cinema filter.

These Epson projectors are impressively bright. The very brightest mode – Dynamic has a slight greenish caste (far less than most projectors’ brightest modes.)  Still, having a full 3400 lumens is great, especially when you consider that Epson only claims 2600 lumens!   With that much horsepower (and well over 2000 lumens with very good picture quality), you can put this projector in almost any room, as long as there’s some basic lighting control, and a proper screen. Note, that the 3400 lumens is full wide angle on the zoom lens. But you get “just a few lumens less” with the lens set to mid-zoom.

Bright Cinema rocks for sports, etc. Color while not perfect, looks great on sports and most things – think, probably still more accurate than most LCD TVs. But don’t be afraid of Dynamic (especially with some minor adjustments) if you need every last lumen for your upcoming Super Bowl party.

Natural tops out over 2300 lumens, but even calibrated, and with the lamp on medium bright, and lens on mid zoom, Natural provides 1842 lumens for your 1080p and other non 4K/HDR/P3 critical viewing!!!

That’s more than enough lumens for a 150″ diagonal screen, Scott says it works great with his 160″ screen, and his only has a gain of 1.0!

Digital Cinema for 4K/HDR/P3 is excellent. Color is both accurate -and offers a wider color space than almost all of the competition, aka better color, often a touch more natural (more colors to do a skin tone, or subtle graduations such as grays or in skies).  But Digital Cinema is a bit cool, so our calibration just made things better/warmer – slightly.

Digital Cinema offers up just a bit over 1100 calibrated lumens when calibrated for 4K/HDR, with P3 color!  Now that’s not a huge amount of lumens for HDR, but it certainly is no problem on my 124″ 1.3 gain matte screen, with the default gamma/eotf setting of 8).   I find that I watch most 4K/HDR content this way. Sometimes when a movie seems overly “dim” I do use the alternative we also served up:  Using Natural mode for 4K HDR, but without P3.  That buys an extra 700+ lumens!   And that does make a real difference, by “settling” for good old REC709, which was the best any of us had until a year or two ago when P3 and 4K started working well.

This Epson HC5050UB can handle 100% of REC709 when not doing P3.  That is still wider color than many DLP competitors can do).  So, as stated elsewhere – you have two modes to choose – the absolute best, but with about 1100 lumens, or about 1850 lumens calibrated (also mid-zoom, full lamp).

Nice to have choices (which I have also said repeatedly)!

As you can see from the table to the left, overall, Digital Cinema starts out – before any adjustment, as being very cool.  Definitely too cool, so let’s just say to use this mode for movies, you want to definitely lower the overall color temp.

The goal is to have all the numbers (except the very low end – 10 IRE, as close as possible to 6500K.  As you can see, we’re mostly at 7500K instead (except the darker ranges)..  Try our settings, or at the least go to the color temp settings and lower them.  Hint: 6500K!

Fortunately, Epson provides very good, well-behaved, calibration controls.  You’ll find all the settings we came up with on our two calibration pages.

In the next table, (below), you are looking at the Digital Cinema settings after Eric calibrated the Home Cinema 5050UB.  Again, the Pro Cinema 6050UB should behave almost identically (give or take variations from lamp to lamp, and other minor differences).

As mentioned elsewhere, the post-calibration color temp throughout the range is probably as close to being dead on the money, as any projector we have ever calibrated.  With a total range of 203 degrees of color temp, that’s tight.  More typical post calibration is a range of 300 – 500 degrees.  Hey, more perfectly calibrated, is better!

From any color mode, switching from full power (High) to Eco mode results in a measured drop in lumen output of just over 35%!  Typically, a 25% to 35% drop is what we expect with most projectors.

These Epson projectors, however, have three power modes. There’s also Medium power, in the middle. Medium mode, by comparison, is almost 25% less bright than High lamp, and almost 15% brighter than Eco.  As a result, most folks should rely on Medium power except when max brightness is needed. We have noticed over the years, that when a lamp is driven at roughly 65% of full power or less, there’s a tendency to see some occasional, minor flickering – best avoided!

We calibrated our “Best” 4K/HDR/P3 mode at full power (High) lamp, because when viewing HDR we generally want all the lumens we can muster (all else being close to equal).  That said, because there is a big difference in fan noise, I do drop from Full power to medium at night when the room is fully darkened, for a lot of my HDR viewing.

In the case of this Epson projector, there’s only a small drop in brightness (8%) going from full wide angle on the zoom, to mid-zoom, but a far larger drop to telephoto – but still only 30%.  That’s really very good.  There are projectors with 2:1 type zooms, that see drops of over 40%.

In other words, if you have to mount this Epson projector as far back as possible, in your room – such as placing it on a high rear shelf, you aren’t sacrificing a really significant amount of brightness – but you lose less than going from full power to low power on the lamp.  On the other hand, if you mount or place your projector with the zoom at about mid-point, you are looking at a drop that is barely noticable at all (8%).