Viewing pleasure that is! The Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 was announced at the end of March, but Epson recently gave us a demo of the projector, which delivers picture resolutions up to 1080p at up to 120 inches in size at a price point of $2,999. And for the money, the high-def picture quality is impressive.
This PowerLite actually uses 1,920×1,080 pixels on each of the projector’s three LCD chips, so it is true HD, unlike similarly priced units that only use one chip and achieve 1080p-like picture quality. Epson ran through a variety of HD content — a Yankee game recorded in HD to a DVR, a Blue-ray movie, an HD DVD movie and a little game play on an Xbox 360. All of them looked fantastic, but the Yankee game and Blu-ray disc were particularly good.
Colors were vivid and saturated, pictures were sharp and well defined and black levels were better than we expected at this price. Our demo was professionally set up and calibrated of course and while Epson’s reps said out-of-box performance would be good, they recommended professional calibration to get the absolute best performance. Fair enough.
There are a couple more pictures below, but if you’re in the market for a 1080p HDTV around $3,000, and really want that “home theater” feel, definitely put this model on your short list of options.
This model has good lens-shift abilities making installation more flexible.
The Home Cinema 1080 has a HDMI 1.3 connection for getting the most from the latest A/V equipment.