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At just $749.99, the Home Cinema 1080 3LCD 1080p Projector is Epson’s second-least-expensive home theater model. Still entry-level, it offers a few extra features that the company’s cheapest model doesn’t, most notably a zoom lens. It won’t deliver the dark blacks and level of shadow detail you would want for a dedicated home theater, but this home projector offers nicely saturated color along with good contrast for bright scenes. And it’s easily bright enough for watching in a family room with the lights on. It’s also guaranteed not to show rainbow artifacts, a key requirement for anyone who sees these image anomalies easily and finds them annoying. (Not everyone does.)
One Chip or Three?
Choices for entry-level home entertainment projectors include both single-chip DLP models like the BenQ TH585P and TH685P that we recently reviewed, and three-chip LCD models like the Home Cinema 1080. Entry-level DLP projectors tend to have better—meaning darker—black levels, and they often deliver better contrast as a result, particularly in dark scenes. However, they can also show the red-green-blue flashes known as rainbow artifacts.
Three-chip LCD projectors don’t have this problem, because they put all three primary colors on the screen at once, instead of one at a time. Three-chip projectors also have the advantage of automatically having matching white and color brightness, which means color images will be as bright as you would expect from the white brightness.
The Home Cinema 1080 is built around three 1080p LCD chips, giving it a native 1080p resolution, and it uses a traditional lamp as a light source. It’s rated at 3,400 ISO lumens (equivalent to ANSI lumens), and delivered the level of brightness in my tests that I expect for the rating. Connection options include two HDMI 2.0 ports.
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(Credit: Epson)
Setup was both straightforward and standard for the category. The Home Cinema 1080 weighs 6.2 pounds and measures 3.6 by 11.9 by 9.9 inches (HWD). It also has a 1.2x zoom, which gives you some flexibility in terms of how far the projector can be from the screen for any given size image. After setting it in place, you only have to connect one or more video sources, turn it on, and adjust the manual focus and zoom.
Although the Home Cinema 1080 is light enough to carry from room to room, or to the backyard for a movie night, it doesn’t fall into the “room-to-room portable” category as we define it, since its doesn’t have particularly robust audio. The quality for its 2-watt speaker is serviceable, and the volume can crank high enough to fill a large family room, but there’s noticeable distortion at the upper levels. For good sound quality, you should plan on connecting an external audio system to the 3.5mm stereo audio out port.
Testing the Home Cinema 1080: Solid Color Accuracy, a Bright Image
The Home Cinema 1080’s menus offer four predefined color modes: Dynamic, Bright Cinema, Cinema, and Game. All are customizable for basic parameters—including brightness, contrast, color saturation, tint, and sharpness. None offers a color-management system similar to the one in the TH585P and TH685P, with settings that adjust hue, saturation, and gain of each primary and secondary color. However, the Home Cinema 1080 delivers suitably accurate color by most standards straight out of the box, and most folks would consider a color-management system overkill for an entry-level home projector.
(Credit: Epson)
As with virtually all projectors, the brightest mode, Dynamic, offers the least-accurate color, since it’s tuned for brightness rather than color accuracy. But even in the brightest mode, colors are still within a range that most people will consider acceptable. None of the modes offers a dark enough black level to deliver good contrast or shadow detail in dark scenes. Fortunately, that’s not much of an issue for watching in a room with ambient light, which is the application the Home Cinema 1080 is meant for. Differences between good and poor black levels tend to get hidden by room light washing out any dark areas on screen, making brightness more important than black level when watching with lights on.
(Credit: Epson)
After some preliminary tests, I chose the Cinema mode as my preferred one for watching movies and video. Throughout my viewing tests, it delivered good color accuracy, contrast, and sense of three-dimensionality in brightly lit scenes, as well as the best color accuracy of any of the modes. It dropped significant shadow detail, but even with room lights on I could still make out what was happening in the most demanding dark scenes in our test suite. Cinema mode even held shadow detail better than Game mode did, which is unusual and also makes it my preferred choice for gaming.
Unlike a growing number of 1080p models, the 1080 doesn’t support HDR or accept 4K input to downconvert to its native 1080p. It also lacks support for 3D, a feature that’s almost standard for DLP models, including the TH585P and TH685P. For those who consider 3D passé, that won’t be an issue, but if you have a library of 3D discs, take heed.
Another potential issue is the input lag, which I measured with a Bodnar meter at 50 milliseconds for 1080p/60Hz input. Most casual gamers will find that acceptable. More serious gamers will want a maximum lag measure of 16.7ms at 60Hz, and preferably support for faster refresh rates that give them half or a quarter of that lag.
Very much on the plus side is the Home Cinema 1080’s high brightness. Based on the Society for Movie and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, 3,400 lumens is bright enough to light up a 265-inch, 1.0-gain 16:9 screen in a dark room. In moderate ambient light, it’s enough for a 150-inch screen. In my tests, the 1080 was uncomfortably bright even in the lower-brightness Cinema mode for a 90-inch screen in the dark or in a low level of ambient light, until I switched to Eco power mode to lower the brightness further. The image also stood up well on an 80-inch 1.0-gain screen in a family room on a bright afternoon using full power mode and Dynamic color mode.
Bright Images and Rainbow-Free Viewing
The strongest arguments for picking the Home Cinema 1080 over the two BenQ models mentioned here are its high brightness and its rainbow-artifact-free image. In our tests, it delivered higher brightness than either the TH585P or the TH685P, which translates to standing up to higher levels of ambient light for any given size of image. Its guaranteed lack of rainbow artifacts stands in sharp contrast to both BenQ models’ tendency to show the flashes more often and more obviously than most current-generation DLP models. On the other hand, both BenQ models offer Full HD 3D and a short enough input lag for serious gamers. The TH685P can also accept 4K HDR input, and handles HDR well. If you need any of these features, either model could be the better choice, especially if rainbow artifacts aren’t a problem for you.
If you must have one or more of the features the BenQ models offer, and a rainbow-free image too, you’ll need to move to a higher price bracket. At around a grand, the Epson Home Cinema 2250, for example, delivers a bright, rainbow-free image and Full HD 3D support. That said, if you don’t need 3D or a short input lag, the Home Cinema 1080’s high brightness makes it well worth considering. And if you also want to avoid rainbow artifacts, it’s a prime contender.
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Epson’s Home Cinema 1080 delivers solid color accuracy and high brightness levels, making it a good fit for rooms with ambient light. It’s not great for gamers, but the image is free of rainbow artifacts.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/epson-home-cinema-1080-3lcd-1080p-projector