Mitsubishi HC3800 – Overall Color & Picture Quality

Posted on September 1, 2009 By Art Feierman

I can’t wait to see what a full production version of the HC3800 can do. While I am extremely pleased with overall color handling, and skin tones, finalized color tables likely will allow for some further improvement. (I can’t imagine there will be great improvement. I should note that he gamma for the HC3800 needs a bit of improvement. Mike’s measurements ended up averaging a too high 2.37 gamma. In part, the average is due to a narrow spike in the near whites – at 90 IRE, where gamma spikes to 2.9!!! Factoring that spike out, the gamma averages 2.3, but that’s still higher than the ideal 2.2 gamma. Mike didn’t measure all the gamma modes, but that one is probably closest, so I’ll be looking for an even better gamma. Also there is some control over the gamma itself. Neither Mike nor I really worked with it for this review.

HC3800

BenQ W6000

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All considered, though, even with the current gamma, the color handling and look and feel of the projected image of the Mitsubishi HC3800 is really very good. This is another of those “a pleasure to watch” projectors (many are of the DLP variety, but not all). I’m not sure that you can find a better performing projector, when it comes to color, in the under $2000 range, and I definitely can’t think of one under $1500!