Mitsubishi HC4000 300-Inch 1080p Front Projector (Black) Sale
- Estimated Lamp Life Rating: 5000 hours (low mode)Usage, Replacement Lamp: VLT-HC3800LP (1-Year or 500-Hours lamp warranty),2-Years Limited Parts and Labor Warranty
- Native 1080p, HDMI connectivity, Manual Focus & Zoom Lens (Zoom Ratio 1.5:1)
- Contrast Ratio: 4,000:1 (on/off), Color Wheel: 6-segment (RGBRGB), Brightness/Lumens: 1300 ANSI Lumens, Decibels: 31dBA (standard mode)
Best Review: Mitsubishi HC4000 300-Inch 1080p Front Projector (Black) - For many theater installs, the HC4000 will be the best 1080p projector in its price range as of late 2011. Epson's 8350 is a strong alternative.My projector is an HC3800. The HC4000 is functionally identical save for an improved DLP chip that yields slightly lower maximum brightness and somewhat higher ANSI contrast. There appear to be no other differences in the manual or elsewhere. My impressions of the HC3800 should therefore apply wholesale to this model. My testing area is a light-controlled room with a 12' x 5' 2.39:1 WilsonArt Designer White screen with 1.2 gain. The throw distance from the lens to the screen is around 16'.Before diving into the main review, I've listed some background issues:PROJECTOR SPECIFICATIONS:Three key specifications of any projector are lumen output, ANSI contrast, and absolute black levels. Lumen output dictates how well the projector will handle ambient light and large screen sizes without washing out or becoming uncomfortably dim. ANSI contrast measures dynamic range, or the brightest and darkest tones the projector can display at the same time. The 'punch' of an image with bright lights and dark shadows is heavily dependent on ANSI contrast. Lower ANSI numbers imply a flatter image with grayer blacks. Finally, low absolute black levels ensure that in completely dark scenes, black appears black and not a dark slate. Room preparation affects the relative importance of these attributes; ambient light and reflected light from nearby surfaces can negate differences in black levels and ANSI contrast.Beyond image quality, certain features aid in placement flexibility. A generous zoom range allows the projector to display a range of image sizes from a particular position, or the same image size while moving the projector. Lens shift allows the projected image to be moved without moving the projector or incurring keystone distortion. These features are more common in LCD projectors than DLP. More expensive projectors can have motorized or automated lens shift, which is helpful if the projector is placed in an inaccessible location or constantly switching aspect ratios.SCREEN TYPES:The projection surface can be almost anything from a painted wall to a retractable, acoustically transparent theater imitation. Gain, a multiplier that interacts with the projector's lumen output to determine how bright the picture will appear, is a fundamental attribute of all surfaces. A typical white screen with no additives has a gain of about 1.1. Maximum gain for white is about 1.3. Gray screens are 0.7 to 0.8. Screens with reflective additives like glass beads or silver can have a gain of up to 4. Gains above 1.3 correspond to progressively tighter viewing cones, so people sitting off-center to a high-gain screen will see a dimmer picture.The purpose of a low-gain gray screen is to shift the entire brightness range of the picture downward. Blacks become blacker, whites become grayer. The combination of a gray screen and a high-lumen projector can effectively compensate for ambient or reflected light that would otherwise cause a very high black level with a white screen. A low-lumen projector paired with gray will just produce a dim picture. For screen sizes below 100", the HC4000 is bright enough to be paired with a gray screen in modest ambient light.DLP VS. LCD:Modern projectors produce color by shooting light through a spinning DLP color wheel or an LCD panel. Each has ups and downs. LCDs can suffer from alignment problems, and some will show a noticeable grid between pixels on large screens. They do tend to have excellent placement flexibility, especially in regard to lens shift. DLPs will have a whine from the color wheel and the potential for some people to experience flashes of color ('rainbows') when they shift their gaze to different parts of the picture. DLP color wheels with more segments mitigate this tendency at the cost of reduced brightness. Lens shift is uncommon. Zoom controls tend to be minimal.HC4000 PLACEMENT:The HC4000 is a DLP projector. It's very small, and when paired with a Vantage Point CGUPM12-S, blends into a black ceiling. Setup is difficult because the lens on the HC4000 is angled and because the vertical center point of the projected image varies with the zoom setting. The lens offset (the vertical shift of the projected image relative to the lens location) is very aggressive, so if the HC4000 is mounted upside-down on the ceiling, wide zooms will produce a large image that may dip into the floor. Because my ceilings are only 8', I have this issue. The same characteristic, however, makes the HC4000 well-suited to short throw distances and placement on a coffee table or between seats.The native projected image is 1920x1080, a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. My 2.40:1 screen corresponds to a resolution of 1920x800, so I used my HC3800's advanced controls to shift the image signal to the top of the pixel grid. The bottom 280 pixels project a black signal onto the floor that generally isn't visible. To match the top of the projected image to the top of my screen, I was forced to tilt the projector slightly upward and correct with the digital keystone controls. The image degradation from keystone was invisible in movies and extremely subtle in Windows.HC4000 IMAGE QUALITY:Sharpness is very good. The HC4000 is capable of showing all the detail and every flaw in Blu-Ray source material. Simply by virtue of the gigantic screen size, it's actually less forgiving than a smaller LCD monitor of the same resolution.ANSI contrast is excellent. Any scene with both lights and darks, which is almost all of them, has as much punch as a non-CRT projector can have. The HC4000 surpasses the Epson 8350 significantly in this area.Absolute black levels are good to very good. Credits and space scenes with small stars look inky. Scenes where a character is bumbling around in the dark are less compelling; as your vision adjusts, the blacks look closer to slate.Color gamut is good. Greens and blues are fairly strong. Red, a bit less so. All three roughly match the standard 72% NTSC of most computer monitors. The gamut is noticeably less wide than my 102% NTSC 2408WFP.Color accuracy is good to excellent. Like all projectors, the HC4000 is capable of a brighter green than red or blue, so the high-brightness white balances will cause a green push. Medium white balance and the first two gamma modes are much more accurate and preferable with little sacrifice to brightness. Color is pleasing out of the box. This projector does not require an external calibrator to look good.Brightness is very good to excellent. The HC4000 is capable of high lumen outputs while preserving black levels and color balance. Few, if any comparable projectors can go as bright in this 'Best' mode, though some of them (e.g., the Epson 8350) have special 'Sports' modes capable of extremely high brightness with a green push. For screen sizes over 100" with significant ambient light, these alternatives may be a better choice.Subjectively, the HC4000 and a large screen will astonish almost every first-time viewer. When backed by a powerful speaker system, the experience is as thrilling, or more, than almost any theater.HC4000 GENERAL:No complaints about the menu system, which is effective, easy to navigate, and functional.The HC4000 has an 'Aspect' button on the remote that digitally switches between 2.39:1 and 16x9 aspect ratios. This is the most compelling feature of the unit if you intend to use it with an HTPC and a 2.39:1 screen. Switching aspects with other projectors like the Panasonic AE4000 or Viewsonic's Pro8100 requires moving the lens around. The HC4000's digital switch is instantaneous. You do lose some resolution; 16x9 uses the equivalent of 1420x800 pixels instead of the full 1920x1080, but the downsampling algorithm is excellent and you won't miss the difference.I've seen a couple of niggling issues among four HC3800s that also apply to the HC4000. One had a small amount of light bleed from the projector body. In a noise-dampened room, the high-pitched whine of the color wheel is too apparent to me. The HC3800 is also acutely sensitive to HDMI cable quality. With my 25' cable run, every now and then, I'll see a subtle sparkling in the deepest blacks. Equally rare is an aberration that looks like a heat current drifting across the frame in bright areas of static images.SCREEN SELECTION:I'm compelled to write a small aside on screen aspect ratio and how it relates to anamorphic content and the Aspect button.With DVD, the standard NTSC resolution is 720x480. PAL, the European format, is 720x576. These correspond to aspect ratios (width:height) of 1.5:1 and 1.25:1. Movies are filmed at wider aspect ratios, generally 1.85:1 or 2.39:1. Encoding these films to DVD conventionally wastes a lot of vertical resolution; in the case of a 2.39:1 movie on a PAL DVD, the upper and lower quarter of the DVD picture would be a black signal. So-called anamorphic DVDs solved this problem by distorting the aspect ratio of the film to fill the DVD frame, squashing it on the horizontal axis and expanding it on the vertical. A special anamorphic lens attached to a projector could then stretch this signal out horizontally to remove the distortion, thereby using all the resolution of the DVD format for the film. The projection screen would typically have an aspect ratio of 2.39:1.Blu-ray changes things. The universal BD resolution is 1920x1080, an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The BD consortium has redefined 'anamorphic' to mean 'a movie filmed in an aspect ratio of 2.39:1'. Read more ›
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