Epson Home Cinema 6500 UB - Physical Tour

The Epson is a mid-sized, rectangular projector with slightly rounded corners. It comes in a white finish. Overall, it's a pretty basic looking projector despite some minor styling touches. It is larger than the 1080 UB it replaces, and is about the size of the Panasonic PT-AE3000. It is a smaller than the LCoS projectors from JVC and Sony, or the BenQ DLP projectors. Overall, size should not be a problem.

Facing the Home Cinema 6500 UB, the lens is offset to the right. The 2.1:1 zoom lens is manual, and extendes partially from the projector case. Focus and Zoom are accomplished by rotating the trim rings on the lens. To the right, below the lens, is the infra-red sensor, and to the left, is the front air exhaust.

As mentioned above, the Power and Source buttons are located on the top by the back. The rest of the control panel is on the right side, near the back.

Closest to the front of the buttons is a large Menu button. to it's right, the four arrow keys on a rocker (diamond configuration, with a center Enter button, and finally closest to the back,

The Home Cinema 6500 UB has a fairly typical selection of inputs and outputs. There are (from the left) two HDMI (1.3b) inputs, a component video input (3 color colded RCA jacks), the basic S-Video and composite video inputs, and an analog computer input (standard HD15 connector), which can double as a second component video input.here is an RS-232 serial port for controlling the projector from a computer or room control sytem. Additionally, this Epson projector has one 12 volt screen trigger.

A new remote control for Epson this year. I'm not sure why, as I really liked the last one. (I guess it better matches the more boxy styling of the 6500 UB.

This remote, however, is every bit as nice in terms of functionality. Buttons are well organized, large buttons, with plenty of spacing. the backlight is orange, and reasonably bright.

From the top: On the left side is a large round power button, and to its right, a small button for turning on the backlight. Next comes three rows of two buttons, one for each of the six sources. Below them, are the menu controls the four arrow keys in a circular layout, with an Enter button in the center. Above to the left and right are the Default and the Escape buttons. Directly below the arrow keys a large Menu button, all by itsself.

That takes you to the bottom four rows of two buttons provide direct access to popular menus including user Memory, color controls, Gamma, Color Mode, Aspec ratio, and Sharpness. There's also a test pattern button and one to blank the screen.

I would have liked one of the buttons to provide direct access to the frame interpolation controls. Too bad, that would have been more useful than the test pattern button.