PRODUCT REVIEW: OCTOBER 22, 2007
Mitsubishi HC6000 Home Theater LCD Projector
Mitsubishi’s HC6000 takes the impressive performance of the HC5000 to a whole new level, but with one minor hiccup.
Figure 1. Mitsubishi’s HC6000(BL) is identical in appearance to the HC5000 (BL),
except for the slightly larger optional air filter on the right side.
A year ago, Mitsubishi turned much of the home theater and CEDIA world on its head with the HC5000, an outstanding 3LCD projector with superb color and smooth, film-like 1080p images. Not only that, Mitsubishi delivered that level of performance for the breakthrough price of $3,999.
Now, Mits has come out with an upgrade with their HC6000. It specifically addresses the complaints reviewers had about the 5000, including black levels and slow auto iris performance. Another issue, dust accumulation in the optical path, has also been resolved with a new filter design, and there’s now a second HDMI port.
OUT OF THE BOX
The HC6000 is in virtually all appearances identical to the HC5000. There are two notable differences: First, the DVI-D connection on the HC5000 has been replaced with an HDMI input. Second, there is an accessory snap-in air filter with much tighter tolerances that replaces the existing air filter. This improved filter should keep dust from settling on parts of the prism or any of the imaging panels.
A new 17-element HD lens design has been incorporated, while the fan is as quiet as before (19 dBA), which is to say it’s barely audible when operating. The zoom lens now has two operating modes for each adjustment. You can toggle on the fly to adjust zoom and focus at high speed, or in small increments. The horizontal and vertical lens shift also has a dual-speed setting.
The connector complement is similar to the HC5000, with one each composite, S-video, and component inputs, a 15-pin VGA jack that supports computer resolutions and doubles as a second component video input, and the two HDMI 1.3 inputs. The 12V screen trigger and RS-232C jacks are retained. Aside from these changes the chassis is identical, so if you have a 5000 you want to upgrade, the ceiling mount brackets and mounting hole positions should be the same.
Figure 2. The rear connector panel sports one less DVI and one more HDMI connector.
Figure 3. Here’s a close-up view of the improved accessory air filter.
REMOTE AND MENUS
Not much has changed here, except that the on-screen menu display is larger and much easier to read. The HC500 remote is a particular favorite of mine in that the buttons are large and spaced out, not to mention backlit. The true test of a remote control is this: Can you become familiar enough with it to operate it behind your back? (Yes, you can operate the HC6000’s remote behind your back!)
In addition to direct access to the six video inputs, the remote also provides three programmable picture memories and fast control of the iris (two settings), aspect ratios (4:3, 16:9, ZOOM1, ZOOM2, and STRETCH); four color temperature settings (COOL, MEDIUM, WARM, USER), and four gamma settings (SPORTS, CINEMA, VIDEO, USER).
For custom settings, you can adjust red, green, and blue contrast and brightness for each of the three memories. You can also tweak the gamma settings at three levels of luminance for each color channel individually, or all three channels simultaneously. The adjustment is nice to have, but three steps aren’t enough — nine or ten would be far more useful.
The lens shift capability hasn’t changed from last year. The total vertical shift is about 50% and the horizontal shift about 30% left and right of optical center. The standard lens has a zoom ratio of 1.6:1, which is better for getting a “squared-up’ image on the screen that is free from pincushioning or other geometric distortion.
All of the improvements to the operating system and remote make the projector much more user-friendly. You’ll get the image zoomed precisely and focused critically much faster than before and you’ll be able to make and save image adjustments quickly. The iris control, which now has two settings (AUTO and OFF), works much, much faster than before; so quickly that you really don’t notice it.
ON THE TEST BENCH
After allowing the projector to warm up fully, I took a quick set of “before” measurements to see what the gamma, color temperature, and color gamut looked like in Cinema mode. The color gamut has indeed been increased over last year’s model; so much that this projector could be used to view content being mastered for digital cinema.
One thing jumped out at me right away from my preliminary tests, and that was erratic gamma performance. Figure 4 shows my before and after gamma curves, and you’ll notice right away the stair-stepped lines with both settings. While this can easily be fixed at the factory, you’d have a hard time correcting it with only three luminance settings to work with in the GAMMA menu. (Memo to Mitsubishi — even out those gamma curves!)
Figure 4. The HC6000’s gamma curves need some help, they’re a bit bumpy in the middle grays.
Figure 5. Once above 30 IRE, the HC6000 is as tight as they come
in tracking the desired color temperature.
After calibration for best grayscale image, I measured brightness at 361 lumens with the lamp operating normally, and 267 lumens with the lamp in LOW mode. I shut off the iris adjustment for contrast measurements, and discovered that Mits has also improved black levels from last year. The ANSI (average) reading was 313:1, with peak (16-block) contrast coming at an amazing 707:1.
Compare those readings with the HC5000 (276:1 average, 486:1 peak) and it appears that Mits has engineered about a 22% improvement in black levels. That’s right, black levels are even lower than before, and things only get better when the auto iris kicks in. I measured a honest-to-goodness 6300:1 sequential contrast ratio, also a big improvement over last year.
Brightness uniformity is about 4% better than the HC5000, while color temperature uniformity across a white field is about the same. As seen in Figure 5, the HC6000 tracks a given color temperature across a grayscale ramp pretty cleanly once you get to 30 IRE. I measured a maximum shift of just 254 Kelvin from that point to 100 IRE.
From 30 IRE down, though, there is a big tilt towards blue, dropping by 1355 Kelvin at 20 IRE. In comparison, the HC5000 had just a 500-Kelvin shift towards blue over the same luminance range, and a comparable tight track (292 Kelvin) from 30 to 100 IRE. So there’s either more work for Mitsubishi to do with grayscale tracking, or I just got a review unit that was feeling a bit punk.
Figure 6a. The HC6000’s color gamut has been expanded considerably
and scales nicely to match the REC.709 HDTV gamut…
Figure 6b. …not to mention the digital cinema (DCI) color gamut.
As for the plotted color space, take a look at Figure 6a. Yep, it’s gotten a lot larger, particularly in the green channel. More importantly, the green channel has a better mix of yellow vs. cyan, which means you can tune up the projector to precisely match the REC.709 HDTV color space.
Surprisingly, you can also get it doggone close to the DCI color space (Figure 6b), with the red channel needing a bit more saturation and the blue channel a tad less. That’s impressive performance for a $3,995 projector!
VIDEO IMAGE QUALITY
Like its predecessor, the Mitsubishi HC6000 retains Silicon Optix’ Reon processor, which means clean 1080i content and scaling of lower-resolution 480i video and 480p DVDs. If you are considering Toshiba’s entry-level HD DVD players (HD-A2 and HD-A3), you can use them quite nicely with the HC6000 as its processor does all the heavy lifting, converting from 1080i to 1080p cleanly.
The HC6000 sailed through all of the Reon DVD and HD DVD tests, including the oddball cadences, mixed film/video, and HD video and film resolution loss tests, without a hiccup. Suffice it to say that you can run pretty much any content you want through this projector and it will come out nearly squeaky clean.
The real improvements to image quality are in black levels, color saturation, and contrast. I could find no better test than to crank up the HD DVD of Batman Begins, one of my favorite low light tests for projectors. The blacks I saw through the HC6000, while not silky black, were as good as some DLP projectors’ I’ve tested.
More importantly, color saturation at low gray levels was excellent. Despite what my grayscale tracking charts showed me, I didn’t spot any objectionable color temperature shifts with flesh tones and pastel colors. (Yes, there are pastel colors in Batman Begins.)
Color shifts would also be visible on Batman’s suit and areas with low gray levels, but those also appeared to stay neutral.
For brightly lit content, colors really pop. I watched a couple of baseball games and one football game on ESPN HD, plus SportsCenter and Comcast SportsNet, two beautifully lit shows. In both cases, colors seemed to be saturated correctly, there was plenty of contrast and shadow detail, and flesh tones held steady at all lighting levels.
CONCLUSIONS
When you stop and think about it, 3LCD technology has come a l-o-n-g way in just five years. I’ll admit (unlike some of my fellow reviewers), there was a time when I doubted I’d ever see this level of image quality from an LCD projector. Now, I just take it for granted and wonder how much better 3LCD can get? My guess is that there are still some surprises waiting in Mitsubishi’s R&D labs.
Color quality has been improved, the gamut has been expanded, and black levels are lower. Mitsubishi just needs to fix the gamma problems I noted, possibly by expanding the number of gamma luminance settings to ten from three. And while they’re at it, tighten up the grayscale tracking at low luminance levels.
That’s not too much to ask, is it?
