Mitsubishi HC4000 Projector – Performance

Posted on July 16, 2013 By Art Feierman

In this section we consider the brightness, sharpness, and image noise of the Mitsubishi HC4000 (check out Mitsubishi here) home theater projector. Also considered are the physical attributes of light leakage and audible noise.

Mitsubishi HC4000 Brightness

Although this is a pre-production projector I’m working with, I don’t expect the full shipping models to be any brighter, as most of this projector’s design has been around for a year and very stable.

I will note that there are some minor differences, but over all, the HC4000 (click for specs) measures a bit less bright than the HC3800. Such things aren’t surprising, it could be lamp variation, or perhaps the characteristics of a Darkchip3 cause some loss, compared to a DC2. I had thought that to a large extent the difference between them was related to quality control, as well as perhaps a different angle of operation for the mirrors? No matter.

Here’s a projector that’s extremely bright in its best mode. The HC4000 (check out Mitsubishi here) manages about 950 lumens in its best mode (Cinema, Medium color temp, Brilliant Color on). That’s almost as bright as the more expensive BenQ W6000.

Lumen Output and Color Temp for various Gamma modes at 100 IRE (Brilliant Color off
Auto	567 @ 6673
Sports	607 @ 6726
Video	584 @ 6763
Cinema	569 @ 6649

When you need maximum lumens, the HC4000 doesn’t have many more in reserve, measuring maximum brightness of 1151 lumens, with gamma mode on Sports, and color temp on medium, but that’s still better than the average home theater projector (average is about 1000 lumens for “brightest” mode, and just about 500 lumens for “best” mode).

Header Content
Medium (default)	607
High Brightness	872
Cool	468
Warm	561

Effect of Color Temp setting on lumen output (Sports mode)

Effect of Brilliant Color on lumen output (Sports mode):

Color Temp on High Brightness= 1150

That would indicate that Brilliant Color is adding about 32% more lumens to the image. That should be comparable in other modes.

Let’s take a look at a couple of images – comparing Brilliant Color On (first image below), to off. The same exposure was used for both, so this provides you with a really good idea of what the difference in brightness is, in real life:

In Best Mode (Stored in User 1, based a modified Medium color temp, and Cinema gamma, with BC off:

In Best Mode with BC off