MovieMate 72 by Epson: Home Entertainment Projector System Review – General Performance3

MovieMate 72 Projector Measurements and Calibration

To my best understanding, based on what Epson says about lamp life, the lamp runs at full power except in Theater Black mode. There is no separate low lamp (eco) mode, or high lamp mode that is user selectable. As a result there is only one set of numbers for each mode. The Game mode is only available if you are running an outside source so no measurements for that mode, since I had my calibration disc in the internal player.

The MovieMate 72’s best mode is Theater Black, overall color balance out of the box was really very good, close to the ideal 6500K. That’s a good thing, since there’s no way to adjust grayscale except for the tint control and that is not really going to help. The grayscale balance out of the box is in the range of an acceptable grayscale calibration, which is to say don’t worry about it. The color temperature, overall, is a little low, but not by much.

Theater Black Mode

MovieMate 72 Theater Mode

MovieMate 72 Living Room Mode

Dynamic Mode

Epson, has really done a good job on setting up the MovieMate 72’s modes. There really isn’t anything to do, but set it up, and start enjoying the really big screen experience.

MovieMate 72 Image Noise

On content from its internal DVD player, image noise was not bad, but hardly exceptional. Using the Silicon Optix HQV test disc, background image noise was a bit noisy, a minor compromise. It was also not spectacular on jaggie tests, scoring only Fair (out of Good, Fair, Fail), however on the other jaggie test of the waving US flag, the jaggies were very hard to spot. Let’s say better would be nicer, but very acceptable. On the motion artifact test the Epson is a little slow adapting, so with the right content such as panning across stadium seats, you may notice the motion artifacts briefly. Again, while a flaw, not a big one, although this was the worst of the performance.

I also fed the Epson MovieMate the test on the HQV 1080 resolution disc, but this time outputting 1080p from my Playstation 3, and just letting the Epson downscale to 720p. The Epson looked great in all cases, with the source from the PS3. Bottom line, the so-so image noise performance seems to be tied to the DVD player, rather than the projector overall. For an all-in-one projector, this is about as good as it gets, however the internal DVD produces less desirable results than most stand alone 720p projectors, with a decent external DVD player. That said, there are a couple of well known stand alone 720p projectors.

MovieMate 72 Projector All-In-One Features