Epson Home Cinema 8350 Projector - Image Quality 8

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Art Feierman

Epson Home Cinema 8350 Projector: Performance, HDTV and Sports

I really like this Epson for sports viewing. The picture is bright (Dynamic mode), colors are vivid, and, overall, the projector has a lot of wow factor! I also like that this year, the projector ends up with pretty good color even in its most pushed mode - Dynamic. It's got a definite improvement in color from last year's. The strong green seems pretty tame this year.

Epson Home Cinema 8350 Projector: Bottom Line on HDTV Sports

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Few projectors anywhere near the price of this Epson can muster up more lumens. One of the lower cost DLP projectors can dig up more lumens, but that one uses a 2x color wheel, which means everyone who's at all rainbow sensitive would see rainbows on that projector. If there are others brighter, near the price, then we're quibbling over a few lumens. I'm not talking about crossover business projectors that aren't designed for "theater".

What really matters though, is that the Epson's overall color and picture look great especially for the price, when you want lots of lumens. I'm talking about when a dynamic looking image up on your screen is more important than flawless reproduction of every nuance. If you want a system that looks downright bright on a medium sized screen, when your lighting is well controlled but not dim, that's pretty much exactly what this Epson is capable of. It performed "brilliantly" filling most of my 128" screen. With the lights off in my testing room, on a 1.4 gain Carada Brilliant White screen, it's almost blinding at times (well, maybe that's an exaggeration), when in dynamic mode. No matter how you slice it, the Epson works for me as a great (and low cost) projector for sports and HDTV in general.

For sports, I still wish it would have CFI for smoother motion. Alas, that's not a feature showing up yet on the around $1000 projectors.