Epson Home Cinema LS100 Laser Projector Review – Calibration Settings

Epson Home Cinema LS100 Laser Projector Review – Calibration Settings: Calibration Presets Notes, Best Mode Calibration, Brightest Mode Calibration

The LS100 has 4 presets (Dynamic, Bright Cinema, Cinema, & Game. For my dark room calibration, I used Game mode (Quiet mode). I used Game mode rather than Cinema because its color gamut was slightly better (more on that later).

Quick note about the 3 lamp modes (Normal, Quiet & ECO). The fan on Normal seems to be a little louder than my Epson 5030 on Normal. Also, having the LS100 in front of me may add to the perceived loudness. Quite mode is the second brightest mode and is also the quietest. ECO is the dimmest, but oddly louder than quite mode.

Cutting to the chase, this LS100 had one of the worst looking gamuts I‘ve seen in a projector. Now, the model I was given for evaluation was a pre-production unit, so it is possible things will improve with retail versions. As I mentioned at the top of my notes, I used Game mode because the gamut measured slightly better than Cinema, but it’s still quite poor.

Some of the issues are common to other projectors like red, blue and magenta being under-saturated at 100%, but over saturated at 20, 40, 60 and 80%. Yellow on the LS100 is in the best shape. It’s green and cyan that are the most troubling. Cyan showed 60, 80 and 100% saturation levels all sitting on the 80% target. As green saturation increases, it moves towards yellow with the 100% green far from its REC.709 target. You could clearly see that green in the SMPTE color bars looked more lime-green in tone, almost dayglow. Calibration did little to improve these issues. I had to be careful because just the smallest adjustment could make things worse.

For my Bright Room calibration, I used Dynamic Mode (Normal mode). Default color temp was in 7500K range with a plus blue, minus red getting more pronounced the brighter the image got. Sadly, the color gamut was similar, yet worse, than what I saw in Game mode. Blue was extremely over-saturated, magenta at 100% was not only oversaturated, but skewed towards red. Green and cyan showed similar errors to Game mode. Cyan had 60, 80 and 100% saturation levels, all sitting on the 80% target, with green running towards yellow. After using the LS100’s CMS controls, I could improve some aspects, while others, I could not.