Mitsubishi HC6800 Projector - Image Quality

Posted on May 29, 2010 by Art Feierman

Mitsubishi HC6800 images below are from either Blu-ray, or HDTV. It is the first projector review not to feature any standard DVD disc movie images. This change is due to the release of Lord of the Rings on Blu-ray. Although different projectors vary in how well they handle SD-DVD (standard definition), let's just say, that if you have a large screen, they won't ever look as good as blu-ray. My belief is that almost all of us with projectors have blu-ray, and are buying blu-ray discs. True, we have old discs, but if my experience is anything, even the better SD-DVDs like the LOTR, are still noticeably inferior. Buying based on low def content, is like deciding between two high performance sports cars based on which one has the best performance and ride when driving through your Costco parking lot at 5mph. Gold-green cast: You may note that most images do exhibit a bit of greenish gold caste. Part of that is the tendency of LCD based projectors to show a bit more green than other technologies, when photographed with my dSLR. It's very evident below in the starship image, of the space clouds. I had originally shot these images, noticing a bit more green, and a goldish caste. I sent the projector back to Mike, who was not sure why that was. He recalibrated, got different settings, and it resulted in better color, losing that greenish caste, (but the camera still adds some), but with the whole 1080p and K-12 reports on tight schedules I never got back to reshooting images. (Tthat also explains why there are a lot less photos in this review. I never did get to shooting the Bond movies, Wall-E, and several others. Finally as always please note: These images are provided to support the commentary. The projectors always look better than the images in our reviews. From a color standpoint, my dSLR camera still adds a very slight green shift to some photo shoots that I have not been able to completely remove in most cases. I now visually attempt to adjust all the images to correct for major abberations in color between big screen and computer screen. In other words, while we can demonstrate differences in black levels and shadow details of the HC6800, the photos are only approximations of skin tone and color accuracy.

Mitsubishi HC6800 Projector: Out of the Box Picture Quality

❮ ❯

The Mitsubishi HC6800 is only so so, out of the box. In fact while the color is pretty accurate in the bright ranges, there's very little red, and a excess blue in very dark areas. A significant shift. Overall, it's not one of the better projectors out of the box. Thus, I beg of you. Get your HC6800 calibrated, or, failing that, try our settings on the Calibration page. Our settings should provide a substantial improvement in color.

Flesh Tones

After Mike's second calibration intent, I was most pleased with the skin tones. As noted, the extra "gold and green" in the images is not very representative of what was on the screen. If anything, skin tones were rather neutral. Not the most natural though. I do feel that this Mitsubishi, if anything seems to add a touch of grey to the skin tones. Only a touch though. You know, it sort of makes people seem a little, well, not pale, but have a slight grey palor. I don't know if that is translating well into your brains, but just remember, I'm trying to describe very slight tendencies of what overall is very good skin tones. By comparison, Gandalf's face below has that slight gold I've been commenting on. Even Arwen seems to have that gold green look. One of these days I'll find a dSLR that doesn't shift the colors enough to notice, and that sure will save me a lot of time...

The Lord of the Rings, from standard DVD. The LG handled looked great on both scenes.

Remember, the same face will look markedly different under different lighting scenarios, such as full sunlight, filtered sunlight, gray overcast, nighttime, fluorescent lighting, and so on.

While there are a few projectors that are able to best the LG in terms of skin tones, it's never by much. The "best" mode abilities of the LG are very, very good, when it comes to natural looking skin tones.