Mitsubishi HC6500 Home Theater Projector Review: General Performance-2

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Art Feierman

Mitsubishi HC6500 Projector: Lens Throw and Lens Shift

For a 100 inch diagonal 16:9 screen, the Mitsubishi HC6500 may be placed as close as 10 feet, 2 inches and as far back as 16 feet five inches, measured from screen, to front of the lens, for a 100" diagonal 16:9 screen. If you plan on a different sized screen, you can use these numbers to figure out the appropriate distances. A 90" screen would have distances 90% of those of a 100" screen, and so on.

This is a bit less range than many 3LCD projectors, and far more, than any of the DLP competition. Still it should work fine in most rooms, including allowing for rear shelf mounting, in most cases, although if you have a long room, and a smaller screen, you might not be able to get the projector far enough back to shelf mount, without projecting an image that overshoots the screen.

When it comes to lens shift, the Mitsubishi HC6500 home theater projector has both vertical, and horizontal lens shift, and the feature is motorized, and controllable from the remote.

The amount of lens shift is very good, about as good as it gets, and provides plenty of placement flexibility. For that same old 100" screen, the HC6500 can be mounted as high as approximately 12.3 inches above the top of the screen surface, all the way down to 12.3 inches below the bottom, or anywhere in between. Although some projectors, on the same sized screen, may be able to go as much as 25" above or below, the HC6500's range is just fine for most. The only time where another foot or so of lens shift would be nice, is if you are ceiling mounting, and have a fairly high ceiling - say over 10 feet, and you don't want the projector to hang down too far from the ceiling. Some others would let you get the projector one foot closer to that higher ceiling.

Mitsubishi HC6500 Projector: SDE and Rainbow Effect, Pixel Visibility

The HC6500 projector has no rainbow effect, being a 3LCD projector, which means no high speed, spinning color wheel.

The Mitsubishi projector's pixels are small enough and fine enough to not be an issue when viewing the projector filling my full 128" screen from about 11.5 feet back. You can make out the pixel structure at that distance, when viewing things like movie credits or graphic overlays (typical of sporting events), but it should not be an issue watching normal movie content!

Bottom line: not an issue. For the very few who might not be happy, there's always DLP or LCoS technology, as the DLP's pixel structure is finer, and with LCoS, much finer than with 3LCD.

Mitsubishi HC6500 Projector: Brightness

Out of the box, the best mode was a bit brighter than most, cranking out 679 lumens with the Color Temp set to Warm, zoom lens in the middle of its range, and gamma set to Auto. Drop the lamp into low power, and you still get 521 lumens, a drop of about 24% (which should hold true, regardless of what modes are selected).

After calibration, the HC6500 remained almost unchanged in brightness, at 663 lumens. That makes it at least a little brighter than most 3LCD based projectors, and for that matter, roughly the equal to some of the brighter DLPs (but not as bright as the brightest), such as the InFocus IN83, or Optoma HD81-LV.

If the Mitsubishi falls short, it is in terms of brightness in its brightest mode, which uses the High Brightness mode. Individual RGB controls will not work in that mode, so we could not calibrate and get a different brightness. The maximum we measured was 1030 lumens in High Brightness mode. More on this in the calibration section below.