Mitsubishi HC3000 – General Performance 3

Lamp Life and Replacement

The HC3000’s lamp is rated 2000 hours in full power mode, and 3000 in low power (eco-mode as many manufacturers call it). This is typical of most projectors in this price range, and, since it is brighter than most, especially LCD projectors, there’s a good possibility that in your room, you might find that you can run the HC3000 in low power, whereas you would use high power for many other projectors. If that’s the case, you get to enjoy a quieter projector, and extend it’s lamp life.

Projector Screen Recommendations

Overall, the projector should be comfortable with anything from about 80″ to 110″ diagonal with a high contrast gray, like the Firehawk, a Da-lite HC CinemaVisiont, etc., but unless you also need those HC screen’s ability to reject some side ambient lighting, I think I would stick to high quality white surfaces with modest gain, like the Stewart Studiotek 130 (pretty much the reference standard out there), the Carada, or other equivilent screens. (The Carada claims a 1.4 gain, and Studiotek, 1.3.)

One more thought for you. Lamps dim over time. Your projector will likely be visibly dimmer by the time you have 1000 hours on the lamp. As a result many users who use low power when they first install their projector, or have an iris closed down, may switch to full power, or open the iris to compensate for the lamp’s lost lumens. When I say that the HC3000 did a passable job with certain settings, on my 128″ screen, remember I’m using a virtually brand new unit. The same claim would not be fully true when the lamp is at 1500 hours, etc.

Calibration Of course, I have had to mention aspects of the calibration and settings previously in the review. Let’s take it from the top. I found the HC3000 to have cool colors (stronger blues) out of the box, than it’s settings would indicate. The goal for movie watching is a temperature of 6500K. Using the HC3000’s Cinema mode, which should produce 6500K, the measurements yielded significantly higher temperatures. At full on white (100 IRE), the HC3000 measured 7629K, at 80 IRE (80% of white – light gray, 7633, and at 50 IRE (50% gray), 7565K. For the calibration, I had contrast at -1 (recommend -2 or -1), Brilliant Color set to On, and the projector was in Low power mode. (you can expect to measure slightly different temperatures in Low and High (Standard, as Mitsubisi calls it) power modes. To adjust the color temperature, I switched the Mitsubishi HC3000 to User Memory 1 (you can’t make the individual color adjustments in their preset modes). I again set the color temperature to 6500K and adjusted from there. With the goal of getting as close to 6500K on medium bright (80 IRE) and fairly dark levels (30 IRE), I ended up with the following settings:

This resulted in some very good results

However measuring full white, still gave me too much blue: 7390K. It is typical, I have found, for many home theater projectors to be very consistant in the 30 – 80 IRE range, but have a signficant shift in the brightest and darkest measurements. The good news, is that if you end up with measurements like this adjusted ones, you should be very pleased.