Mitsubishi HC-3000 Projector Review – Image Quality-2

Posted on July 9, 2012 By Art Feierman

Black Levels and Shadow Detail

I often refer to great black levels being the “holy grail” of home theater projectors. The closer a projector can get to faithfully producing blacks and near blacks, the more shadow detail, richness, and depth a projector seems to produce. Note, having great black levels, doesn’t guaranty great shadow detail, as other factors come into play. If a projector can’t get close to reproducing black, all dark areas that are supposed to be darker than the best black a projector can do, are lost.

The Mitsubishi HC3000 does an exceptional job on black levels for a projector using TI’s Darkchip2 DLP processor. Generally, there is a substantial difference in black levels between the Darkchip2, and the Darkchip3 found in more expensive DLP projectors. In this case, however, the Mitsubishi does a visibly better job on blacks than, for example, the Optoma HD72, which uses the same Darkchip2 processor, and Brilliant Color technology. I was surprised that the difference between the two, turned out to be as significant as it was.

Shadow detail appeared to be very good as well. I’ll start off with a few images, most used in other reviews, and also have some side by side images comparing the Mitsubishi HC3000 with the Optoma HD72.

First, are two images of a starship from The 5th Element. The first one is a “normal” exposure, but, since my digital camera cannot capture the full dynamic range of the projected image, the 2nd one is the same frame, overexposed, to bring out the darker details, at the expense of the brighter areas being overexposed.

I certainly haven’t seen as much detail in terms of number of visible stars on any other Darkchip2 DLP projector, and as noted, it comes close to the performance of some of the Darkchip 3 projectors (with the exception of the currently under $3000 Optoma HD7100, all the other Darkchip 3 projectors seem to be selling from just under $4000 to $15,000+, at the time of this review (July 06).

HC3000projector SinCityKiss