Projector Reviews

Mitsubishi HC7800D Home Theater Projector Review

Mitsubishi’s new HC7800D home theater projector has a manufacturer-suggested list price of $3,499 and it’s sold by local installing authorized dealers.  The projector itself is DLP based, a single chip design. Read our First Look at the Mitsubishi HC7800D blog, or read on!

Mitsubishi HC7800D Projector Overview

The Mitsubishi HC7800D is small for a home theater projector.  It has a shiny black finish and is generally “not bad looking at all” – a bit techie, in physical appearance.   The HC7800D is the middle of the Mitsubishi home theater projector lineup.

The HC7800, a DLP projector, is straddled by Mitsubishi’s LCoS based HC9000D projector on the high end of performance, and the HC4000 on the low. The HC9000D won our Best In Class award earlier this year end. The Mitsubishi HC4000, a low cost DLP single-chip projector, currently sells for well below $1500.

That lower cost HC4000 been a long-time favorite of ours as it’s in its third year (including the almost identical HC3800).  Okay, that’s the Mitsubishi lineup of home theater projectors. Of course Mitsubishi makes about 3 dozen “business or education” projectors, a few of which can be considered cross-over products – decent in the home, but nothing that would rival the quality of the HC7800D.  So, once again, let’s get back to the HC7800D,

I want to mention the 1.5:1 manual zoom lens, which has a pretty good zoom range for a home DLP projector. That provides you with more placement flexibility than at least most of the DLP competition, and allows the HC7800D projector to compete with most LCD and LCoS projectors in terms of placement flexibility, especially considering it has vertical lens shift as well.

This is a fairly well endowed projector.  The Mitsubishi HC7800 has creative frame interpolation for smooth motion.  It also offers a full CMS (color management system) for calibrating the projector.

The HC7800D comes with a remote control, which has a little bit old design, but we’ll talk about that later.  When it comes to audible noise, DLPs tend to be a bit noisy.  The HC7800 is not an exception but it gets fairly quiet particularly in its low power setting.

Mostly though, what’s important is the picture. We will discuss that a great deal, in the following pages, but I did want to say, that overall, picture quality is really very good.

Let’s take a closer look at the Mitsubishi HC7800D.