Epson Pro Cinema 800 Projector - General Performance2

You can also turn on/off the Auto Iris of the projector from the Picture Menu.

Other Epson Pro Cinema 800 projector menus include the Settings Menu, where you can adjust Keystone Correction (avoid if at all possible), putting in your own logo (when there is no source signal - how about a family picture, text, or anything you think is cool to display)? Projector orientation is also on the menu (front projection, front ceiling (inverted projector) projection, rear, etc.

The Cinema 800 home theater projector offers an impressive nine separate memory settings, so go crazy, you can have some settings for a completely dark room, (ie Movie, TV, sports), others when there is more ambient light, and still others for your brightest usable room settings.

Most of the key menu functions, such as color presets, memory recall, and aspect ratios are accessable from the remote. For example selecting the presets let's you navigate through them with the remote's arrow keys. This is a lot faster than on some projectors, where each time you hit the button it advances to another setting, which can be very time consuming if each time takes a couple of seconds.

Screen selection

Basic recommendations: A gray screen will help lower black levels. But a high contrast white surface (or near white) will work best for dealing with ambient light situations, and should be ideal for larger screens, and sports and TV watching. If you are going under 100" diagonal, and have a dark walled room and can fully darken, I would recommend the gray surface. At 100" or larger, go with the lighter surface.

Projector Lamp Life

Epson rates the lamp at 1700 hours at full power, but movie watchers rejoice; in the Theater Dark modes it jumps to an impressive 3000 hours, rivaling or exceeding all but a handful of other home theater projectors.

Projector Noise

In the quietest modes, the Epson 800 is virtually silent. When you switch to other, brighter modes it does get a bit noisy, but then, if you are watching a sitcom, or a sporting event, would you really care if you could hear its only slightly detectable noise. Let's just say that in those brighter modes the Epson is a bit noisier than most other projectors we have reviewed. If silence is your big thing, and you need to run your projector bright, this might not be the perfect solution for you.

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