Epson PowerLite Pro Z10005UNL Projector Review – Image Quality

Out-of-the-Box Color Quality

The above photo gallery includes screen shots for 6 of the preset color modes.  These were with the projector operating with the out-of-the-box, factory default, picture settings.  I found the most accurate color modes produced images that appeared somewhat better than what I was able to capture in these photos.

As a general observation, the brighter color modes tended to have rather high color temperatures with an overall green or blue-green tint while the color modes with the more accurate colors were less bright.  This is typical for most projectors.

More specific, the Dynamic Color Mode had a moderately strong blue-green tint, but not as extreme (actually less so that it appears in the 1st gallery photo above) as I have seen with some projectors that I have reviewed.  Yellows appeared a little too green and Magenta appeared a little too-blue.  For the case where the maximum brightness is of prime importance, the Dynamic mode may prove useful.

Sports Color Mode was the 2nd brightest (similar brightness to Presentation mode) and it had a moderate blue-green tint that was a little less than in dynamic mode.

Presentation Color Mode was the 3nd brightest and was similar to Sports mode.

Photo and DICOM SIM modes had similar brightness but these 2 modes were very different due primarily to the substantially different gamma curve used for DICOM SIM mode.  I found that both of these modes still had a somewhat cool appearance, but less so than the Dynamic, Sports or Presentation modes.  Overall I found Photo mode to be a little behind Theater and sRGB in terms of color accuracy.  DICOM SIM mode is intended for displaying black and white medical images, therefore its color accuracy is not an issue.

Theater and sRGB modes were the least bright, but offered the best out-of-the-box colors.  In fact, both of these modes offered very good color accuracy with the factory default settings.  Of the two, the sRGB offered more accurate colors while with Theater mode the colors tended to be a little over saturated.  However, I felt this could be easily corrected with the available CMS and grey scale adjustments offered by the Z10005UNL.

The bottom line on color accuracy is the out-of-the-box colors could be very good, especially in sRGB and Theater color modes, and could be further improved by using the projector’s available controls to perform a partial or full calibration.

Text Quality

The text quality, as shown in the above 3 gallery photos, was excellent.  I noted no color fringing on the text, indicating both excellent alignment between the red, blue and green sub-images (very little misalignment of the projector’s display panels) and no chromatic aberration issues were present with the projector’s lens.  I was able to get excellent focus over the entire page of text that was being displayed.

The gallery photos above were with my connected laptop set to output the text image using the projector’s native 1920 x 1200 resolution.  To test the video scaling performance of the Z10005UNL, I lowered the resolution coming from the laptop to 1280 x 800.  The following close-up photo shows that the Z10005UNL does an excellent job at up-scaling the lower resolution input image, with even the 8 point text still being very legible.

Video Quality

The first 5 gallery photos above are from the movie ‘Lucy’, the next 6 photos are from the movie ‘The Fifth Element’ and the final 6 photos are from the movie ‘Casino Royale’.  For these screen shots I operated the projector in Theater Color Mode. The only change from the factory default setting was to change the color temperature setting to -1 and I had the dynamic iris turned off (however I would recommend using the dynamic iris when viewing video content on this projector).  Overall the projected image looked a little better than shown in these screen shots, especially on a couple of the scenes from the James Bond movie Casino Royale.

Bright scenes looked very good while on the darker scenes the shadow details were not up to the level of a mid-range home theater projector, including those from Epson.  However, in this area, I found the Z10005UNL to be better than most business class projectors that I have reviewed.

In viewing video on the Z10005UNL, I found the dynamic iris to be effective at subjectively improving the contrast and black levels.  However, for my testing I was projecting the image onto a 120″ (diagonal) screen in my fully light controlled home theater and I was operating the projector in it normal power mode (i.e., rather than Eco mode).  The image was extremely bright, even in Theater mode, producing an image of over 100 foot lamberts of brightness from my screen (that’s really bright).  As a result, even with the dynamic iris in use, during very dark scenes the blacks were a moderate grey and the image was a little washed out.  On brighter scenes the image had very good depth with vibrant colors.  With a projector this bright, a screen size of 200 to 300 inches could easily be accommodated when used in a light controlled room.

The bottom line is the Z10005UNL does a very good job for projecting video and has the light output for when you have a large venue and/or a lot of ambient light to contend with.  This projector is not intended for use with ‘small’ screen sizes typically found in homes or moderate sized office conference rooms, while for its intended large venue use (i.e, with a large screen or with significant ambient light to contend with), it does a great job for displaying video.