Projector Reviews

Black: 0.0009
White: 20.2

Full-On/Full-Off Contrast Ratio: 22,444:1

All the measurements here, unless noted otherwise, were taken in the User1 Gamma mode, the Auto Iris in Auto 5, the Contrast on –10, Brightness on +3, and the Lamp mode on Low.

The full-on/full-off contrast ratio above is objectively spectacular. But it’s rendered significantly less impressive by the subjective results in the review.

With its auto iris engaged, the Mitsubishi is, by a small margin, the brightest of the projectors in its Low Lamp mode. It beat out the Sony for brightness honors in the Standard Lamp mode as well (auto iris still engaged) by a marginal degree, where it produced 28.8 foot-lamberts at a black level of 0.0012, for a full-on/full-off contrast ratio of 23,638:1—again, a number that is much more impressive than the projector’s visible contrast performance. Turning off the auto iris, in the Low Lamp mode, increased the black level enormously, to 0.036 ft-L, and reduced the full-on/full-off contrast ratio to 548:1.

The Color Tracking charts below show how well a display adheres to the D65 standard; the tighter the overlap of the three primary colors, the nearer the result is to D65. The Before Calibration result is poor, with severe slopes from low to high. While it wasn’t possible to completely flatten them, the After Calibration curves are better, apart from some issues at the darkest and brightest ends of the spectrum. The Delta-E (a numerical measure of how closely a display comes to the desired D65 color temperature, with values under 4 considered good) was about 4 or less from 20 IRE (dark) to 90 IRE (near peak white), except for a reading just above 5 at 20 IRE and 50 IRE (mid brightness). But it degraded to approximately 16 at 100 IRE (peak white). Oddly, however, the Delta-E fluctuated wildly at the projector’s maximum brightness (100 IRE), sometimes dropping to under 5. This variation wasn’t a problem at other brightness levels.

The color gamut shown in the pie-shaped CIE chart above shows the Mitsubishi’s excessively wide color gamut. Without a color management system, or even a selection of fixed color gamuts to choose from, this cannot be improved. Overly wide color gamuts are common in the consumer video industry, but they are often less obvious to the eye on most source material than the measured deviations might suggest.—TJN