Projector Reviews

Video processing was otherwise about average. The 1080i rotating bar test pattern off the Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark Blu-ray exhibited jaggies starting around 20°, but they were very small. This was representative of the performance from the ship clip on the same disc, which showed small jaggies on the horizontal rigging. Performance was better on actual DVD movies, with the upconverted image showing a decent amount of detail. I’ve seen some projectors do a little better here, but the Mits HC7800D did so without adding any noise.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the HC7800D is its competition. Over the past few months we’ve reviewed Sony’s VPL-HW30ES, which has a better contrast ratio, more accurate color, and horizontal and vertical lens shift for easier installation, and Epson’s Home Cinema 5010, which is significantly brighter and a little cheaper, and also has horizontal and vertical lens shift. (Both projectors got our Certified & Recommended seal.) Then there’s JVC’s DLA-X30 LCoS projector, baby brother of the DLA-X90R, a model that demonstrated best-in-class contrast ratio when we reviewed it. This is all to say that even without the HC7800D’s oddities, it faces difficult competition from some extremely heavy hitters.

Bottom Line

Mitsubishi’s HC7800D 3D DLP projector puts out a clean, detailed image with fairly accurate color. But its mediocre black level and native contrast ratio conspire to create a sub-par performer. It’s not a bad projector, but with so many other excellent projectors in this price range, it’s hard to certify “not bad.”

Test Bench

Color temperature (AV Memory1 mode before/after calibration)

20-IRE: 6,213 K/ 6,511 K

30-IRE: 6,185 K/ 6,460 K

40-IRE: 6,235 K/ 6,477 K

50-IRE: 6,253 K/ 6,570 K

60-IRE: 6,252 K/ 6,555 K

70-IRE: 6,216 K/ 6,516 K

80-IRE: 6,282 K/ 6,546 K

90-IRE: 6,256 K/ 6,570 K

100-IRE: 6,925 K/ 7,281 K

Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. HD Standard

With the HC7800D’s AV Memory1 picture and Medium color temperature modes selected, its grayscale range measured slightly warm, with a cool spike on the brightest images. After calibration, its grayscale measured much closer to D6500, though the spike at the top end of the grayscale remained.

Color points all measured fairly close to accurate. Red was slightly oversaturated, green was slightly greenish-blue, and blue was slightly bluish-green.

In the Standard lamp mode with the auto iris set to Off, maximum light output was 22.69 ftL on a 1.0-gain, 102-inch 16:9 screen. In this same mode, the black level was 0.016 ftL, for a native contrast ratio of 1,418:1. When I reduced the lamp to Low, these numbers decreased to 17.22 and 0.011, for a contrast ratio of 1,565:1. The auto-iris produced the best contrast ratio at the Auto2 setting, reducing black level in Standard lamp mode to 0.0023 while delivering 22.77 maximum light output  for a dynamic contrast ratio of 9,900:1. The other two iris settings decreased the black level slightly less while maintaining the same maximum brightness. The Auto3 lamp mode’s maximum brightness was very slightly higher at 23 ftL.

When the auto-iris is active, a large shadow appears on the screen’s lower left. However, this was only noticeable on totally black images, and not with actual video material.

The HC7800D reproduces all pixels in a 1080p image, with no cropping.