1080p Comparison Report - Image Quality5

Epson Home Cinema 6100 projector

Check this out from the Home Cinema 6100's review: "After our grayscale calibration, skin tones really looked very believable. The color textures in faces are very good. Despite that, the Home Cinema 6100 doesn't appear quite as natural as some other projectors in handling the flesh tones." This is chronic Epson. The trade-off seems to be the slightly more dynamic look to the Epson image compared to those other projectors. In other words, the aspects that I like to refer to as "pop and wow" seem to take their toll in making the projector a touch less "film-like" (a very subjective terms - as are pop and wow).

InFocus X10 projector

Click to enlarge. So close. Here's the champ of the lower cost group in terms of skin tones. I opened the section in the review with this comment: "We're now talking about after our basic calibration. Skin tones are gorgeous (they really are pretty good, even out of the box, before any adjustments). This is an attribute that the X10 shares with the more than double the price IN83." That pretty much says it all!

The Epson Home Cinema 6100, from The Dark Knight

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$2100 - $3500 1080p Home Theater Projectors

BenQ W5000 projector

I have always liked this projector. In its review I finished off with this about its skin tone handling: "Bottom line: While the out of the box color performance (Cinema mode) on skin tones is very watchable, setting up a user mode, based on Cinema mode, but decreasing the green content just slightly, makes the BenQ W5000 really excellent!"

Epson Home and Pro Cinema 6500UB, 7500UB projectors

It's that pop and wow vs. natural again. I put it this way in the review: "After calibrating the Epson Home Cinema 6500UB, skin tones improved a bit, to the point of being really very good, but not the best. Still not as natural, as, say the InFocus IN83, and I'd even give the Panasonic PT-AE3000 a slight edge."

Epson Pro Cinema 7100 projector

Again, we assume the same performance as the Home Cinema 6100 we reviewed: "Skin tones really looked very believable. The color textures in faces are very good. Despite that, the Home Cinema 6100 doesn't appear quite as natural as some other projectors in handling the flesh tones." What I added to that, above, holds true here, as well: the Epson does skin tones extremely well most of the time, but the worse the source content, the less natural it looks, compared to some other projectors. Thus, the Epson tends to be strong on Blu-ray and HDTV, but less so, on TV and SD-DVD... In such cases, should you notice, dialing down the saturation helps.

Mitsubishi HC6500, HC7000 projectors

The HC6500 did a particularly good job on skin tones: "Beautiful, at least, after calibration. In fact the Mitsubishi HC6500 really does an excellent job. Skin tones look extremely natural..." No more need be said.

For the HC7000, I tended to rave about them even more than with the HC6500. My key statement in the review: "Post calibration, flesh (skin) tones are excellent. I found the HC7000 to really look good on all types of skin tones, in a wide variety of movies and other content." What more could you ask for?