Mitsubishi HC4900 DLP Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance-5

Posted on August 19, 2007 by Art Feierman

HC4900 Projector Measurements and Calibration

Overall, the Mitsubishi HC4900 was off a bit from the desired 6500K temperature in Cinema mode. It runs cool, with white at 6774K. The darker grays are even cooler.

The adjustment controls of the HC4900, however, are flexible, and it is fairly easy to adjust grayscale balance. That is something that those of you using the AVIA or DVE disks to fine tune your projector, will really appreciate.

We initially adjusted the brightness to +1, and contrast remained unchanged. Color (saturation), we reduced to -1, although there were definitely times when viewing content, where the image was slightly oversaturated.

After starting with the initially cool default settings (mostly around 6800K - 7200K) I ended up with these settings, after a few minutes of trial and error:

Default Settings


100 IRE	6657K
80 IRE	6732K
50 IRE	6830K
30 IRE	6997K

Further adjustment should be able to bring the range closer than the 440K difference between the warmest and coolest range, and further "warm" the image, but these numbers produce an excellent, very watchable image.

The adjustments made to accomplish that


Contrast	Red= -3Green= +3, Blue= 0
Brightness	Red= 0Green= +2 Blue= +2

Contrast

Red= -3Green= +3,

Blue= 0

Brightness

Red= 0Green= +2

Blue= +2

Fleshtones with these settings were pretty natural, and the overall settings, worked just great, even though they can be improved upon.

HC4900 Image Noise

There seems to be a difference in some noise levels compared to the HC5000, and in some cases I noted a graininess to the image when I viewed at distances that were probably just a little too close to be considered reasonable seating distance. However, I did not turn on the Noise Reduction circuitry. Overall, I don't think the processing is a problem, but there are cleaner images out there. Jaggies were definitely not an issue, and it performed pretty well on motion artifacts too.