Mitsubishi HD1000 720p Front Projector
Introduction:
For many home theater aficionados, front projection is the final frontier of the home cinema experience. When one measures screen size in feet rather than inches, it is safe to say that the true cinema experience has found its way into the home. Until recently, front projection has been too prohibitively expensive for many enthusiasts to consider. Panasonic, Mitsubishi and several other companies have just released front projectors that are entering the market at very low price points. The Mitsubishi HD1000 has a MSRP of $995 and is available at street prices that are quite a bit below that number. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at this new breed of projectors - - both 720p and 1080p - - and how they perform in the home theater environment.
Equipment & Methodology:
For this series of projector reviews, the folks over at
Carada have been kind enough to provide us with a 93” Criterion series Brilliant White 16x9 screen. I personally feel that
Carada offers an exceptional value to those budding front projection enthusiasts who are looking for an extremely high quality fixed screen at a third the price of some of the name brands. The
Projection Screens - Home Theater Projector Screens by Carada screen is beautifully made, extremely easy to assemble and install and produces an extremely accurate image with no discernable hot spots. Customer service at
Carada is also second to none. From the time my screen was custom ordered,
Carada was in constant communication with me and I had the screen installed on-wall within seven days of the order being placed. If front projection is in your future, I highly recommend visiting
Projection Screens - Home Theater Projector Screens by Carada for more information.
In addition to the
Carada screen, the following hardware has been used in this review:
Panasonic DMP-BD10 Blu-Ray Player
Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD player
Dish Network Vip 622 HD satellite receiver
Denon DVD-2910
Hdtvsupply.com HDMI Cables
ISF Calibrator Steve Martin has joined me for the technical portions of this series of reviews. Steve is a member of the
Lion Audio / Visual Consultants network. He received his ISF training in May of 2000 and has been calibrating professionally since 2001. Steve is also a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Having done all of my calibrations since 2003, Steve has always impressed me with his ability to not only get outstanding results from my Video equipment, but to walk me through the calibration process by showing me exactly what the calibration is doing to make my display achieve its best possible picture. For more information on services offered by the
Lion Audio / Visual Consultants team, please visit
Lion Audio/Video Consultants Welcomes You! Home theater Calibration Video Audio Display ISF Imaging science foundation Training Education Consultation Setup Video Essentials Digital video essentials Avia Extron Ideal lume Cinemaquest Cable Sencore C3.
Steve's calibration equipment consists of:
Colorfacts CF-6000 (Gretag Macbeth Eye-One) spectrophotometer
Accupel HDG-3000 test pattern generator
Colorfacts Professional 6.0 software
Specifications:
Contrast: 2500:1
Technology: Single Darkchip DLP – 720p Native
Video Formats: 1080i, 720p, 576p, 576i, 480p PAL, NTSC and SECAM
Inputs: HDMI, VGA, Component, Composite, S-Video, USB, Serial, Trigger
First Impressions:
The Mitsubishi HD1000 is a small projector, weighing in at a mere 7 lbs. It has a generic black and grey exterior shell that is a bit plain, but by no means offensive. The Mitsubishi offers manual zoom and focus and no vertical or horizontal lens shift, so installation is a bit awkward. I spent a good deal of time trying to position this projector and it did prove to be a bit of a challenge to get the image well centered. As with any projector, using keystone and overscan settings should be avoided at all costs. They do not help the picture quality and ruin the true 1:1 pixel mapping capabilities of these projectors. The HD1000 is intended to be ceiling mounted as the image is projected significantly above the centerline of the lens. You had better be sure that your mount is dead center to your screen and that you have a bit of vertical room to raise and lower the projector, otherwise you are probably going to be pretty frustrated when trying to install the HD1000. The HD1000 also makes use of a true 720p single DLP chip. While the initial image was fairly pleasing, it seemed to be overly enhanced and pretty badly calibrated out of the box. I also was keenly aware of the dreaded DLP rainbow effect with this projector. Some users won’t have this problem, but for those that do, it is initially very distracting. Fortunately, as one spends more time with this projector, the rainbow effect lessens as your eyes adjust to this phenomenon. Temporal dithering is also apparent from close distances. If viewed from normal distances, (eight feet or more) dithering noise and other anomalies inherent to DLP technology are not visible or distracting.
The remote is small and jam-packed with buttons. It is, however, pretty intuitive and I adjusted quickly to its layout. Another nice aspect of the HD1000 is that once activated, the menus don’t disappear after a pre-set length of time. You have to manually cancel the menu in order to get it off of the screen.
Objective Measurements:
Steve was pretty unimpressed with the out of the box image that the HD1000 was producing. A quick check of the various user modes showed that greyscale was way off on all modes, sharpness was way too high and that colorspace was somewhat accurate, with the green severely shifted towards yellow. When diving into the calibration, Steve was also disappointed with the lack of colorspace control within the HD1000. While he was able to make greyscale adjustments that brought the projector within the acceptable range, colorspace was locked into place. The strange yellowish-green color phenomenon was apparently a permanent feature with the HD1000. While this might not seem like a big deal to many of you, the incorrect green level actually causes the projector to produce green tones that look a bit like pea soup. So, when watching a football game, one will never get that nicely saturated green of the field out of the projector. It will always seem a bit pale and will never have a nice green pop. On a brighter note, gamma was pretty accurate out of the box and the projector itself does feature user-selectable gamma controls.
CIE Chart:
RGB Levels Before Calibration:
RGB Levels After Calibration:
Gamma After Calibration:
Subjective Measurements:
The Mitsubishi HD1000 produces a very rich image after calibration. The aforementioned yellowish-green problem is noticeable on a variety of different programming types and this is a problem that will haunt this projector until someone figures out the service menu codes that will hopefully unlock greater color controls. Despite this problem, the projector is capable of producing a very nice image with excellent skin tones and a nice level of detail. Black levels are also good with an excellent amount of shadow detail. I viewed several titles from my Blu-Ray and HD DVD catalog on this projector and was usually pretty impressed with the results. HD satellite material was also nicely presented. Standard Definition content was well scaled without many troublesome scaling issues. It’s important to again mention this projector’s price. For a projector in the sub thousand dollar range, these are pretty minor issues that can very easily be looked over considering the price. All told, there are plenty of projectors out there at three times the price that pale in comparison to the Mitsubishi HD1000.
The Final Analysis:
The Mitsubishi HD1000 is available in stores now with a MSRP of $995. That’s a tremendous value for a full 720p DLP projector that can output well over 1000 lumens. Although Steve felt that the lack of colorspace controls was a dealbreaker, I found that despite some limitations, this is still a nice projector that throws an impressive image. You’d be hard pressed to find anything else in this price-range that can produce this crisp and detailed of an image. If front projection is a must and you have a severely limited budget, the Mitsubishi is an outstanding option. If you are looking for a pure reference projector with perfectly accurate colors, then you might consider looking elsewhere.
