Epson Home Cinema 8700UB Projector - Performance

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Art Feierman

Epson Home Cinema 8700UB Brightness

The numbers below were recorded by Mike before and after calibration. They were taken with the original pre-production 8700UB projector. We normally anticipate that full production projectors will be a bit brighter. Since the original work with that first projector, Epson sent us a full production 8700UB. True to expectations, it measured brighter. With the projectors set up, side by side, the newer projector produced approximately 9.4% brighter than the first. I did not remeasure all the modes. Since I presume that the newer projector is more typical in terms of lumen performance, each of the original measurements has been increased by the 9.4%, for your convenience. The original numbers are in ().

Lumen Output and Color Temp at 100 IRE (mid zoom):


Dynamic	1203 (1100) @ 7472
Living Room	1079 (986) @ 8148
THX	503 (460) @ 6898
Theatre	454 (415) @ 7852
Theatre Black 1	465 (425) @ 6558
Theatre Black 2	414 (379) @ 5261
x.v. Color	472 (431) @ 6512

While both Theatre Black 1 and x.v. Color modes both have a good color temp number at 100 IRE, they are both too red in the grayscale balance. THX mode is the “Best mode”, and this year can be fully calibrated, which could not be done with the older Epson 8500UB THX mode.

Uncalibrated, THX mode measured 460 lumens on the pre-production unit, and should therefore compute to 503 lumens on the production 8700UB.

In brightest mode - Dynamic mode, the production 8700UB measured 1203 lumens.

Low lamp will drop the brightness of the projector by approximately 22.5% (from 460 lumens down to 357 lumens on the pre-production model)

Effect of zoom on lumen output (Dynamic mode):


Zoom out	1256
Mid-zoom	1100
Zoom in	837

The impact of the numbers above show that there is significant impact to where you mount, in terms of distance from your screen. If you are going large screen, a closer mount will give you more lumens, but there are other trade-offs. Also figure most lenses aren't at their best at their absolute extremes.

Color Temp over IRE Range (Pre calibration – Best mode): THX


30 IRE	6753K
50 IRE	6718K
80 IRE	6682K
100 IRE	6898K

That's a good set of numbers - pre-calibration! The target is 6500K. The slightly higher numbers indicates a just slightly cool image (a bit more blues than reds). This is a slight shift, and further corrects with calibration. Note how consistent the color temp is, across the IRE range. (Note, below 20 IRE the color temp gets warm, so both our 8700UB projectors here exhibit a bit of red in the blackest blacks, which is visible in some of the longer exposure images in this review

Post calibration, the pre-production projector clocked in with 18 less lumens, a total of 442 lumens for "best" mode.

Our "quick-calibration" of Dynamic mode - which is designed to improve color as much as possible without sacrificing a lot of lumens, should yield a brighter than average 1194 lumens on the full production projector, and with even better color. Sports looks great! I've got some football images of course, for your consideration.

Please check out the video summary of this review for a good demonstration of how the Home Cinema 8700UB performs in the real world. You'll see a video that pans my room with two windows partially open, and sunlight coming in. The view will swing around and then show you the image - in our quick-cal(itbrated) dynamic mode, under those conditions.

The Calibration page will provide the settings we used. That includes basic settings as well as gain and offset. We will revise, with numbers from a production projector if there are color table changes, between this unit and full production ones. I don't expect that to be the case, though.