Epson Home Cinema 8700UB Projector: Bottom Line on HDTV Sports 2

Here are a series of images to show relative brightness in different modes, and different ambient light situations. Using the same image as above, below are Dynamic, Livingroom, and THX modes, using the same exposure, so it shows you relative brightness differences.

For these pictures the room lighting was low – one of the shades only open about a foot, (as seen to the right) letting sunlight in,, plus shutters to the right of the screen partially open, plus the usual leakage around each of the shades. In reality the room isn’t that dark. I could sit in my chair there, and read a newspaper, though more light would be better (for the screen image to not be blown out, the correct exposure makes the room much darker than it is.:

Let’s throw most of the “kitchen sink” at the Epson, by opening up more windows to let more sunlight in.

Opening one door shade most of the way, and the other partially, lets in a lot of light, with sunlight running across the medium light carpeting:

The Epson’s image (filling the full 128″ inch diagonal), is significantly washed out (below) by all that ambient light. Oh, it’s still watchable – but only if you have no better choices. Closing the more opened shade to to be open as much as the one next to it, though, provides a more than sufficiently good looking image. Her’es the image with the windows as shown above

That’s a pretty impressive drop in brightness from the two bright modes to “best” movie mode. (It’s more of a drop than most projectors, because Epson places an color filter into the lightpath in best mode, for better color, but less lumens.

I should advise you that the Epson has three modes of creative frame interpolation, for motion smoothing. I always use the low setting for sports. It’s fine, and works! I don’t play with the higher settings. I’ll leave that to you. Start with the #1 setting. Try 2 and 3. If you like the additional affects, go for it.

I have been very pleased with the Epson for both sports and high quality digital content. All together, I’ve now spent about 40 hours with the Epson, and it has been most satisfying!