Mitsubishi HC9000D Projector - Physical Tour-4

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Art Feierman

Mitsubishi HC9000D Lens Throw

The motorized 1.8:1 zoom lens offers excellent placement range. For the classic 100 inch diagonal 16:9 screen, the HC9000D can sit with the front of its lens as close as 11.2 feet from the screen, to as far back as 20.7 feet.

That range will allow most people the option to rear shelf mount the projector as an alternative to ceiling or table top. That it vents out the side, not the rear, also supports shelf mounting, but of course, don't crowd it, like all projectors - it needs to breathe.

HC9000 Lens Shift

Both horizontal and vertical lens shift are motorized and controllable from the Lens Shift button on the HC9000 remote control.

The amount of vertical and horizontal lens shift is almost as good as it gets for a home theater projector

Consider, the maximum shift is 1 screen height in each direction.

Translated, for that 100" screen - which has a 50" height, you can mount the projector as high as 25" above the top of the screen to 25" below the bottom. That means you have a total range in where you place the projector of 100 inches vertically. Up to 50 inches above and below the screen's vertical center!

There are a few others with lens shift in this range, but most have less. It'a always nice to have available.

That takes care of vertical. for horizontal lens shift, you can place the projector almost as far to each side as the edge of the screen.

Remember though, using horizontal lens shift reduces the amount of vertical shift available, and vice versa.

HC9000D Anamorphic Lens

The HC9000D, as expected, support using an external anamorphic lens. For those without the budget, a 2.35:1 screen is still doable. The zoom lens has more than enough range that you can do what I've been doing with the HC9000, and that is using the zoom to fill the full width of my 124" diagonal 2.35:1 screen, for Cinemascope movie viewing, or zoom out, to allow 16:9 and 4:3 content to fill the vertical height with letterboxing on left and right. This solution eliminates the above/below letterbox found when viewing Cinemascope movies on your standard 16:9 shaped projector screen.

Essentially, you would be doing manually, what Panasonic calls Lens Memory on their PT-AE4000 projector. Not elegant, but it sure works (I've also been doing the same with all the projectors with at least 1.5:1 zooms that have been coming though here). Of course it's a lot easier with a fully motorized system like the HC9000D, than, doing it manually with an Epson 8700UB. Also, if your projector doesn't offer motorized zoom, focus and lens shift (wheras the HC9000 has all of those), such manual projectors are likely to be impractical for this, if ceiling mounted.