The Short Form

$3,999 / EPSON.COM / 800-463-7766

Snapshot

A compact 1080p projector that offers impressive out-of-box performance and loads of adjustments to make its picture look even better

Plus

• Bright, punchy, yet accurate picture • Plentiful video adjustments • Great remote control

Minus

• Somewhat noisy cooling fan

Key Features

• 1080p resolution • 2.0X zoom lens • Accepts 1080p/24 input signals • Manual zoom, focus, and lens shift • ISF certified • 12-volt trigger output • 170-watt UHP lamp • Ceiling mount and spare lamp included • Inputs: 2 HDMI; VGA; component-, composite-, and S-video; RS-232C • 11 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 17 1/4 in; 19 3/4 lb

With its latest 1080p LCD front projector, Epson takes a cue from the airlines by offering both coach and first-class versions. The PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB and the PowerLite Pro Cinema 1080 UB are pretty much the same projector. As with coach and first-class, the big difference is in the amenities: The Home Cinema has a 2-year warranty, but the Pro Cinema adds another year as well as a spare bulb, a ceiling mount, and ISF certification. Appropriately enough, the Pro is sold through custom installers (who provide a much higher degree of service than do the so-called "box movers" who sell the Home version), and it costs $1,000 more. We requested the Pro Cinema for review. After all, when's the last time you turned down an upgrade?

Epson says the Pro Cinema's contrast ratio is 50,000:1, but comparing that to the ratings of some other projectors is like comparing a Concorde to a Cessna 152. Like other LCD models — and some LCoS and DLP models — the Pro Cinema has to "cheat" with its automatic iris adjustment to get to that elevated number. For the projector to display a bright frame of video, the iris opens up to permit all the light from the lamp to reach your screen. For a dark frame, the iris shuts down so that the black and dark-gray parts of the picture get darker. But the iris can have only one setting per frame, so it doesn't do anything to improve the contrast of still images. (Epson specs the single-frame, or "native," contrast ratio at 4,000:1.) Still, the company's contrast claim is basically legit — after all, you buy a projector like the Pro Cinema for Pirates of the Caribbean, not PowerPoint.

I doubt that many people outside of Epson's own engineering staff would know what to do with all the adjustments on this projector. Everything a video technician would want and need is here, and Epson also threw in some exotic touches: a skin-tone control; cyan, yellow, and magenta color-calibration controls along with the usual red, green, and blue; and a cool multipoint gamma adjustment that shows you which part of the image you're adjusting. The color-temperature presets let you tweak grayscale in increments of 500 kelvin (K), ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 K — a level of precision I haven't seen before. And a technician can program ISF Day and Night viewing modes, with four separate memories provided for each mode so the picture can be optimized for up to four source devices.

The back panel hosts a typical set of inputs. Noteworthy inclusions are two HDMI jacks, a VGA jack for computer video, and an RS-232 jack.

The remote control looks like it was designed by a group of professional A/V installers. Not only does it have separate buttons for power on and off and for each input, but it also has dedicated buttons that let you bring up the gamma, color-temperature, contrast, and skin-tone adjustments instantly.

SETUP

I can't imagine that anyone — whether a professional or a do-it-yourselfer — would have any trouble doing basic configuration of the Pro Cinema. The horizontal and vertical lens-shift controls give you a lot of leeway in positioning the projector without having to rely on keystone adjustments (which reduce picture resolution). That the zoom, focus, and shift controls are manual and not motorized doesn't bother me, since you only have to set them once — but you might need a step stool to access them in a ceiling installation. Also, the lens-shift controls aren't as easy to adjust as they could be, so getting the picture centered takes a bit longer than it should.

I placed the Epson on a table that lifted it to a level even with the bottom of my 72-inch-wide Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 130 screen. The projector sat 9 feet from the screen, but I could have put it much further back, thanks to its 2X zoom lens. It's nice to have such flexibility, especially if you want to mount the projector on the wall opposite the screen — although running the lens at the full telephoto setting does cut down the light output.

PERFORMANCE

Even without professional installation or any sort of calibration, the Pro Cinema's picture looked pretty impressive. With the projector at its factory settings, the detail and depth blew me away; the word that came immediately to mind was "punchy." I quickly figured out that the Cinema Night mode offers the more accurate color, so I used it for most of my testing. (The Cinema Day mode delivers a brighter but less true picture.) A minute or two of basic adjustments to brightness, contrast, and color brought the performance to the point where I wondered if there was much more to be gained by plunging deeper into the picture-setting menus.

I did notice that some of the characters in the Blu-ray Disc of The Fifth Element looked like they'd just run a couple of blocks in 90° heat. Measurements taken with a color analyzer told me that the color temperature was running about 400 K lower — and thus slightly redder — than the 6,500-K preset I'd chosen. Tweaking the offset and gain controls for red, green, and blue brought it close to perfect, with a maximum error of about 70 K. My efforts paid off in rich but not overhyped color and pleasingly natural skin tones, no matter which of the movie's wide array of characters appeared onscreen. (Incidentally, I found that the Pro Cinema's unusual skin-tone adjustment made such a barely noticeable difference that it really wasn't worth fooling with.)

The blacks looked excellent for an LCD projector, if not as deep or dark as I've seen from the best DLP models. The auto-iris feature helps; in dark scenes, the blacks are deeper than I've ever seen from an LCD projector. I thought I might see some "pumping" in dark areas of the picture as the auto iris adjusted to brighter or darker scenes, but the effect ranged from subtle to unnoticeable.

Let's finish with a brief list of what the projector does and doesn't do. It accepts 24-frames-per-second video signals from Blu-ray Disc players. Its noise reduction offers three level settings and works well without a big loss of detail. And it flunks the film-detail test on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark Blu-ray test disc, but I didn't notice any problems with standard program material.

BOTTOM LINE

Competition is fierce among $3,000 to $5,000 projectors, but Epson's Pro Cinema 1080 UB performs about as well as the best. The only significant feature it's missing is a stretch mode for viewing 2.35:1 aspect-ratio video on an ultra-wide screen, but the lens option you'd need for that costs $1,000 to $2,000 more than the projector itself. I'd be thrilled to have my home theater take flight with this projector — in either coach or first-class.

Color temperature (Cinema Night Setting/6500° temperature before/ Cinema Night Setting/6500° temperature after calibration):
20-IRE: 6,590 K/6,292 K
30-IRE: 6,643 K/6,284 K
40-IRE: 6,678 K/6,302 K
50-IRE: 6,915 K/6,555 K
60-IRE: 6,875 K/6,532 K
70-IRE: 6,892 K/6,554 K
80-IRE: 6,906 K/6,526 K
90-IRE: 6,944 K/6,568 K
100-IRE: 6,868 K/6,511 K

Brightness (100-IRE full field): 12.3/17.4 ftL
Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard

Color	Target X	Measured X	Target Y	Measured Y
Red	0.64	0.66	0.33	0.33
Green	0.30	0.26	0.60	0.65
Blue	0.15	0.15	0.06	0.07

The Epson's Cinema Night picture preset delivered the most accurate color reproduction when the 6,500 K color temperature preset was selected. Grayscale tracking before calibration was +/-415 degrees K of the 6,500 K standard from 20 to 100 IRE, which is pretty good performance right out of the box. Adjustments made to the red, green, and blue gain and offset controls improved grayscale tracking to +/-216 degrees K from 20 to 100 IRE — not a great result on first glance, but the projector tracked within +/-68 degrees for most of that range. Color decoder tests through the HDMI and component inputs revealed that red was slightly low and green was perfect. As compared to the SMPTE HD specification for digital TV colors, the set's red, green, and blue primary color points were quite accurate, for the most part showing just a hint of oversaturation.

The Epson's 17.4 ftL brightness (post-calibration) was good for a projector in its price range. Black levels were unusually deep for an LCD projector. Contrast ratio was 3.466:1 with auto iris off, 8,710:1 with it on. Overscan measured 0% for 1080i/p-format high-definition signals with the picture size set to 100%; reducing the size in 2% steps through the menu delivered fairly accurate results. The Epson displayed 1080i/p and 720p test patterns with full resolution on both the HDMI and component-video connections. However, on 1080i/p signals, single-pixel vertical lines appeared dim — a frequency response roll-off that will result in slightly diminished detail. The calibration of the gamma control was off — the factory 2.2 setting actually delivered a gamma of 1.8, but raising the setting to 2.4 brought the measured gamma up to 2.3 where it should be.

Brightness uniformity was good at all settings; black and white fields showed only minor variations in brightness. However, when using the picture presets that employ the low lamp brightness setting, I noticed an obvious shift toward red in the upper left corner and toward blue in the lower right corner when a full-field white test pattern was displayed. I did not notice the color shift with normal program material, though.

The projector passed all the standard-definition upconversion tests contained on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark DVD test disc, detecting 3:2 pulldown fairly quickly but delivering a little less detail than I've seen from many other displays. It passed all of the tests on the HQV Benchmark Blu-ray disc, producing barely noticeable jagged edges on tests such as a shot of a flag blowing in the breeze. The projector offers three levels of noise reduction plus an off setting; the noise reduction was reasonably effective without noticeably reducing detail except at the highest setting (where the reduction was still only slight).