I grabbed the box and was surprised how small and light it
was. There is almost nothing to it! Well I went into my theater
and sealed myself in. Upon opening the box, I found an accessory
pack on the top, which consisted of various cables, remote,
manual, etc… Below was the projector in a couple foam
inserts. I took the unit out and looked it over. It is a 2
tone color scheme, but it is only noticeable if you look closely.
Part of it is a black color, but most of it is a dark navy
blue (very unique in this regard). The unit ships with a molded
lens cover which dresses it up a bit (although not much usefulness
in it). It removes very easily to expose the lens. I flipped
the unit over and got out my mount. Oddly enough, the 3 mounting
screws are located towards the back of the unit, away from
the lens. I adjusted my universal mount to fit it, and fortunately
the unit is light enough that having the main point of the
mount towards the back isn’t an issue. I only comment
on this as I have never seen such a mounting outline on a
projector. Anyways, I got it setup and hung from my ceiling.
I fired up the projector and using the remote, I positioned
the image on the screen. One thing that is nice on the unit
is that the lens controls are variable. At first they start
slow with single button pushes, or you can hold the button
and you can hear it slowly clicking. The longer you hold it,
the faster it starts to adjust. This allows you to have the
fine tuning controls at your finger tips, but still gives
the flexibility of larger movements upon initial setup. Unfortunately,
the zoom, focus, and lens shift adjustments automatically
default to a grid pattern instead of the actual image. This
isn’t a problem for the focus, but for the zoom and
shift, it makes it a bit difficult to know when the image
is correctly positioned on the screen. You basically have
to get it about where you think it is correct, and then exit
out to check an actual image, and repeat. Not a big deal as
setup is only 1 time typically, but it is a bit cumbersome.
The unit was surprisingly quiet. In fact in the low lamp mode,
it was almost dead quiet…quiet enough that my HD DVD
and video processor combo were louder.
I next ran through the adjustments. I did the standard brightness,
contrast, etc… and then setup the color temp on User.
I did an initial measurement, and it was 7368k (x=.300 and
y=.318). I went into the adjustments for the color temp and
dialed it in to D65. Note, all Mitsubishi adjustments are
done in the user menu…they don’t provide the service
menu. In my adjustments, I found that I could get grayscale
tracking pretty close using the standard gain/bias (Mitsubishi
calls them contrast/brightness), but not perfect. Fortunately
they have a user adjustable gamma adjustment. In this, you
can do RGB all separately in low/mid/high levels. With this
I was able to fine tune the grayscale tracking so it was about
perfect. I measured the primaries/secondaries next. The secondaries
tracked pretty close to the CIE standard, but the primaries
were slightly oversaturated. Unfortunately, there is no ability
to adjust these in the HC5000BL, so you have to live with
it. Some people like the colors to be very saturated, and
in that case this will not disappoint. For me personally,
I prefer them to be more accurate, so the image appeared a
bit too color intense. This you can see in the screenshots
as compared to some of the other reviews I have done.
Now it was time to take some measurements. The unit has 2
lamp settings…standard and low. I found that both had
decent output, and in my room I found the low was plenty with
the lights off. At the highest lamp level (D65 calibrated)
I measured 553 lumens. Being LCD, contrast is usually the
biggest obstacle to overcome. As I mentioned before, this
unit has a dynamic iris. The DI allows what is normally a
lower contrast unit, to produce a much higher level of contrast.
I tested it as high as 3083:1 with the DI set to Auto 1. However,
the black levels weren’t as dark as many other projectors
I have reviewed, so depending on the room setup, this may
benefit from a screen that can aid in black level. I also
threw up a grid test pattern to check convergence since this
is commonly a concern of 3 chip designed projectors. I had
a touch of red shift in the upper left quadrant, but it was
not noticeable at normal distances, or with actual video information.
I also took a look for pixel structure, or SDE. I found that
I could see the general grid up to about 1:1 distance/width
away. Considering most people sit at least 1.5x away, this
is a non-issue.
On to the fun stuff…the picture. I threw in my standard
test discs. The first thing I noticed was the colors (which
I touched upon earlier). They were a bit oversaturated for
my taste, but I know many people like that look so this is
not something I would classify as a negative, but rather a
subjective item to each person. I noticed the sharpness was
very good. I was able to fully resolve intricate details with
this unit without issue. The iris worked well when in dark
scenes as the black levels were on par with other LCD’s.
However, I found that the DI was a bit slow in responding.
I’ll be more specific. Going from dark scenes to light
scenes the change was quick and unnoticeable. However, going
from a light scene to a dark scene, you can see the iris closing
down over the period of about 1-1.5 seconds. Not a long time
one might think, but I found it noticeable on certain drastic
scene changes, and a bit distracting. In other projectors
I have reviewed (that had DI’s) this phenomenon I had
never noticed (not saying it wasn’t there, but it wasn’t
as obvious if it was). I tried the same scenes with the DI
off, but I found that it was more bothersome to live with
poorer contrast. In a nutshell there are pros and cons to
everything. The processing of this unit was quite good. I
did send an image from my video processor as well, and the
HC5000BL’s internal processing held its own as compared
to that.
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