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Epson Home Cinema 6500UB Projector Calibration and Settings

Posted on October 9, 2013 By Art Feierman

We calibrate each home theater that is reviewed. It is a pretty standard calibration, there’s always more that can be done by some of the “hi-end” calibrators.
30 IRE (dark gray): 6330K
50 IRE (medium gray): 6524K
80 IRE (light gray): 6350K
100 IRE (white): 6225K

That’s pretty consistent, but a little on the warm (red) side. Changing the Color Temperature setting from 6500K to 7000K shifts it a little more, towards blue.

Header Content
Theater Black 1 6225K
Theater Black 2 5174K
Theater 7693K
Dynamic 6503K
Living Room 7671K
Natural 6478K
x.v.Color 6144K

Immediately below are the color temperature readings for all of the preset modes, for white (100 IRE):

 

Epson Home Cinema 6500UB 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.

Our final settings (the default settings for Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Tint are all 0, in all modes). Mike made adjustments to these, and the Color Temp settings for each of the seven modes:

Contrast:
TheaterBlack 1: -3, TheaterBlack 2: -4 Theater: 0, Dynamic: -2, LivingRoom: -3, Natural: -1
Brightness
TheaterBlack 1: 2, TheaterBlack 2: 2 Theater: 2, Dynamic: -2, LivingRoom: -3, Natural: -1
Color Saturation:
TheaterBlack 1: -3, TheaterBlack 2: -4 Theater: 0, Dynamic: 10, LivingRoom: 10, Natural: 0
Lamp Mode: High Brightness (full power)
Dynamic Iris: Off for measurements, on for movie watching, off for sports…

Note: The high saturation for Dynamic and Livingroom are for dealing with significant ambient light.) Back off these numbers, as needed. For most of my viewing, in LivingRoom, for sports, for example, I set saturation to 2 for modest ambient light.

Zoom set at mid-point for all measurements

All other settings at default

We recommend you save all changes to the User memory modes There are plenty of them, and you can rename them to suit.

Epson Home Cinema 6500UB Post Calibration Grayscale

The Home Cinema 6500UB produced good post calibration results, with a resulting good picture, but this Sanyo does not calibrate particularly well, and most other projectors can produce output consistently closer to the ideal 6500K. That said, the picture color is very good, and very watchable. Here are the measurements after calibration, for Pure Cinema Mode:

Header Content
White (100 IRE): 6440K
Light gray (80 IRE): 6591K
Medium gray (50 IRE): 6556K
Medium gray (50 IRE): 6556K

That’s very nice, consistent performance very close to the ideal 6500K.

To get the most out of the Home Cinema 6500UB a calibration is necessary. You have three calibration options: Calibrate it yourself, with calibration discs like the DVE-HD, or Avia, have a professional calibrate it, or you could drop in our settings. Ours may not be perfect for your Home Cinema 6500UB (as each projector is a little different, mostly due to lamp variation), but using ours is likely still a far sight better than sticking with the out of the box settings.

 

The 6500 UB also has separate color management controls for each primary and secondary colors.

Gamma settings: According to Mike’s calibration, the setting that is closest to the ideal 2.2 for movie watching is labeled 2.4 in the Epson menus. From a individual standpoint, I preferred using 2.3, as I found the 2.4 setting a little dark overall. You can fine tune with the custom gamma settings as well.

Epson Home Cinema 6500 UB: Bottom Line Sharpness
Epson Home Cinema 6500UB RGB Settings