Epson Home Cinema 6500UB Projector Review

Home Cinema 6500UB Projector Highlights

• Extremely bright in brightest mode, with reasonably good image quality, only a few projectors are brighter, and they cost a lot more
• Very good warranty – two years, with an overnight replacement program
• Full support for HDMI 1.3b with 24 fps, Deep Color…
• Good, not great, “out of the box” color accuracy – better than average
• Slightly noisier than average, definitely quieter than the DLP projector competition, but noisiest of the 3LCD projectors
• Great Price/Performance, even if you decide that the frame interpolation is not typically usable

Epson Home Cinema 6500UB Projector Overview

Last year we awarded the older Epson Home Cinema 1080 UB, our Hot Product award, and more importantly, our Best In Class award for under $4000 1080p projectors. It should come as no surprise that this new top of the Home Cinema line projector, the Home Cinema 6500UB, an even better projector, would also earn our Hot Product Award.

The Home Cinema 6500UB projector is one of two “flagship” models from Epson. The other is the Pro Cinema 7500UB. They are basically identical except for five things: The 6500UB lacks internal support for an anamorphic lens (you would need an outboard video processor like the DVDO Edge), The 7500UB has internal anamorphic lens support, it has a black casing, instead of the 6500UB’s white case. The 7500UB also is ISF Certified (the addition of ISF Day and ISF Night memory modes, and different names for some of the preset modes). Finally, the Pro version comes with a three year warranty instead of two. There is also a difference in terms of where you can buy these projectors: The Home Cinema 6500UB is sold online, and through local dealers while the Pro Cinema 7500UB is local dealer only.

Finally, there is a price difference. The Home Cinema 6500UB is $2999 initially, less a $200 rebate. the Pro Cinema 7500UB is $3999 but comes with a ceiling mount and a spare lamp, which definitely reduces the upfront difference in price, but still ends up more expensive than the 6500UB.