Projector Reviews

Setup & Tests
Setting up the Epson was no more complicated than any other small home-theater projector. The onscreen menus provide all the controls you'll need. There's no keystone correction, but that's no loss and is rarely needed if the lens can be shifted, as it can in this projector.

Epson provides a projection-distance calculator at epson.com/support. I set up the 1080 UB in the usual position in my room—about 12 feet from my 78" wide, 16:9 Stewart Studiotek 130 screen.

The HDMI Video Range control worked best in the Expanded setting—the Normal option clipped information below black. The Super White control, which disables the HDMI Video Range control, appeared at first to add punch, depth, and contrast on some scenes. But it crushed the blacks. Once the Brightness control was reset to compensate, Super White offered no visible benefits.

I set the Sharpness Control to Standard mode in the factory default position (centered at 0), which proved to be the best choice. The Skin Tone control (which I left centered—there is no Off setting) seemed redundant with Tint.

After some initial experimenting, I never felt the need for any gamma setting other than 2.2, nor did I have any urge to use the Custom gamma option.

The Auto Iris was nearly seamless in its action, and I used it for most of my viewing. I rarely saw signs of pumping, in which the light output increases or decreases in ways that stand out visibly from the program material.

The Epson's video processing performed as well as most far-more-expensive video displays—and better than many of them. Apart from a merely fair result on the jaggies tests from the HQV Benchmark DVD and a brief flash of moiré on the high-definition Vatican wall shot from Mission: Impossible III, the Epson turned in good to excellent results on all of my usual HD (1080i-to-1080p) and SD (480i-to-1080p) video-processing tests via HDMI. This included recognition and proper handling of 3:2 pulldown on both SD and HD material.