QUICK PICK REVIEW: FEBRUARY 12, 2008
Epson Powerlite Home Cinema 720
Even though 1080p gets most of the “buzz’ these days, 720p projectors are still a great value.
The rapid decline in prices for 1080p front projectors (particularly those using 3LCD technology) has been accompanied by a commensurate decline in 720 designs. As a result, there are some very good deals out there on 3LCD and DLP home theater projectors.
Do you give up all that much by forsaking the extra pixels? Most of the time, no. 720p projectors represent a nice “middle ground” platform for viewing red laser DVDs (particularly those scaled to 720p) and broadcast HD content, which is delivered in the 720p and 1080i picture formats.
Figure 1. Epson’s Powerlite Home Cinema 720 looks remarkably similar to its 1080p siblings, even down to the mechanical lens shift.
Epson’s Powerlite Home Cinema 720 (ESP $1,299) is targeted directly at the entry-level home theater marketplace. Although this 3LCD projector has a low price, it includes some very useful features including mechanical lens shift, dynamic iris, and a 2:1 zoom lens. There are also numerous color adjustments and tweaks for improving picture quality.
OUT OF THE BOX
The HC720 isn’t a small projector. It measures 16” x 12” x 5” and weighs 12 pounds, but it should fit just about anyplace in your theater. The exhaust vent is on the front, with the connector panel to the rear. Thumbwheels on the top and side of the cabinet control the lens shift, and the focus and zoom are manually operated.
Epson has provided one of each of the most common AV inputs. You’ll find composite, S-video, and component jacks, plus a 15-pin VGA connector and an HDMI input. There’s also a SCART jack, which is commonly used in Japan. An RS-232C jack for remote control and a 12-volt screen trigger round out the jack panel. (I’ve seen more costly home theater projectors that don’t include screen triggers.)
The remote control is a rather fat “dog bone” design, but that wide-open layout makes it easier to navigate the buttons (19, plus a navigation disc), all of which are backlit. Epson has provided direct access to each of the six inputs, plus quick access to numerous menu adjustments including picture presets, aspect ratios, gamma, color temperature, and a handy test pattern for setting up the lens.
Figure 2. Close-up view of the rear panel connections.
Figure 3. Epson’s remote control is a bit beefy, but easy to navigate.
MENUS AND ADJUSTMENTS
In addition to the basic image adjustments, you’ll also find detailed settings to fine-tune images to suit your taste. There are seven picture presets (Dynamic, Living Room, Natural, Theater, Theater Black 1, Theater Black 2, and sRGB), with Theater Black 1 optimized to match reference CRT monitors and Theater Black 2 intended for viewing of black and white films.
Color temperature can be set in 500-degree increments from 5000K to 10000K, or you can go into the RGB menu and calibrate offset and gain for each primary color. A second color adjustment menu allows for small tweaks to hue and saturation of RGB and CMY primaries and secondaries (although not enough to correct for color space errors, as I found out).
The HC720 also has six aspect ratio settings — Normal (4:3), Zoom (letterboxed 16:9), Wide (stretched 4:3), Squeeze, Through, and Squeeze Through. In addition to the usual sharpness setting, there are also adjustable high-pass and low-pass filters for cleaning up low-resolution video through the composite and S-video jacks.
Additional tweaks include nine levels of gamma correction, along with five gamma presets (2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4). There is also a skin tone adjustment, but I’d stay away from that control if you’ve calibrated the projector to the correct white point. The progressive-scan menu lets you cycle between film and video modes, but not automatically. Finally, you can save your settings to one of nine picture memories.
PERFORMANCE
After calibration for best grayscale image quality, I measured brightness in Theater mode at 334 ANSI lumens. (This number varies up and down by several hundred lumens, depending on the image preset mode you’ve selected.) Brightness uniformity was outstanding at 87% to the average corner and 78% to the worst corner.
Contrast measured 325:1 ANSI (average) and 460:1 peak in Theater mode. Peak (50/50) contrast measurements didn’t change much with each preset, ranging from a low of 329:1 in Living Room mode to 485:1 in Natural picture mode. As for gamma, my final calibrations produced readings of 2.28 (Natural) and 2.51 (Theater) — just about where you’d want to be to watch TV shows and movies.
Figure 4. The Home Cinema 720 is erratic when tracking a given color temperature.
Figure 5. This projector has a large enough color gamut to cover the BT.709 HDTV color space, but the value of green is shifted too much towards cyan.
The HC720 doesn’t track grayscales as consistently as its pricier 1080p siblings. I was able to calibrate the white point exactly to 6500K with a 50% gray window, but color temperature readings wandered a bit above and below that point, shifting up as much as 700 Kelvin.
Color accuracy was not as good as I’d hoped, although respectable. The green dichroic filter used in the projector has a bit too much cyan in it. Although this does result in a brighter image, it makes calibration to a standard color space like BT.709 or the digital cinema standard very difficult — there isn’t enough correction possible in the yellow and cyan channels.
IMAGE QUALITY
Here’s where you’ll notice what Epson has sacrificed in the interests of lower prices. The lack of an “auto” 3:2 detection mode is a bit of a nuisance when switching back and forth from TV programs to movies. When enabled, the HC 720’s 3:2 cadence detection is very fast and works well. But it has to be disabled when watching live TV, or unwanted picture stuttering may be seen.
In either case, the quality of deinterlacing is average to below average. I saw plenty of scan line artifacts with the Realta HQV “jaggies” test patterns and the waving flag sequence from that DVD. Using an outboard scaling DVD player fixes these problems completely, particularly if you drive the projector with a 1280x720 progressive signal.
The HD DVD and Blu-ray versions of this disk show the projector is taking some shortcuts with 1080i processing, too. You’ll see the same “jaggies” in the Realta video resolution lost test, and there was ample jitter during the film resolution loss test. Once again, the solution is to handle the video processing outboard and feed this projector a cleaned-up 720p signal.
SD and HD images from red and blue laser DVDs had plenty of contrast and decent black levels. Colors appeared to be saturated correctly, with no “red push” evident. The auto iris works fast, although I actually preferred it disabled most of the time. You’ll get the most film-like images using any of the three theater preset modes, with the first being my favorite.
The HC720 was one of the featured projectors during the recent Super Bowl HDTV Party, lighting up a rear screen from my deck with Fox’ 720p HD telecast. Those images really “popped” with great color saturation, excellent contrast, and fine picture detail, even with fast motion. The supplied lens could be a bit sharper in the corners, but that’s another trade-off for hitting a low price point and one that most viewers could live with.
CONCLUSIONS
Epson’s Powerlite Home Cinema 720 is one of the better low-cost home theater projectors I’ve tested. It looks great when fed a steady diet of 720p and 480p content, but is a bit challenged with 480i and 1080i program material. Even so, the projector’s longer throw lens, full range of image adjustments, and two-axis mechanical lens shift (coupled with a good upscaling DVD player) make up for its shortcomings.
