Mitsubishi HC7900DW Sharpness

Sharpness is excellent. Single chip DLP projectors always have an advantage, and Mitsubishi manages to put some quality glass on this projector (13 elements in 4 clusters).

The HC7900DW simply looks sharper than most of the projectors to cruise through here in the last year . That includes pretty much all the LCoS projectors and 3LCD projectors. The image sharpness certainly also looks as good as any DLP in the price range, including the pricier Optoma HD8300.  True, we like detail enhancing features like the Sony's Reality Creation, but here we're talking real, native sharpness

Mitsubishi HC7900DW: Bottom Line Sharpness

Bottom line: There's nothing like a good single chip DLP projector for sharpness. With no panel convergence issues to deal with, a good optical path design, and a good lens, should yield a sharp clear image that lets you appreciate all that good full HD resolution content.

The Mitsubishi HC7900DW places a sharper than most of the competition image, up on the screen. You'll probably appreciate it more with digital content like sports, rather than film, since film based content starts out a little soft, but you will be able to appreciate it!

For your consideration: Nice and sharp - CNBC and Cramer and lots of small text and numbers!

Sharpness is definitely a key strength of the Mitsubishi HC7900 DW projector.Without fiddling with fancy dynamic controls, this HC7900 DW should definitely look a bit sharper on sports and other HDTV content, than most of the 3 panel competition.

Click Image to Enlarge

Light Leakage

Image Noise

In 2D, the projector looks pretty clean in terms of basic mosquito noise, for a DLP. Such noise seems more evident on DLPs but this one is pretty good.

Panning 24fps content is pretty good.  Some panning has showed up once in a while on some other (including very expensive) projectors to be unsually jerky at certain pan speeds.  The Mitsubishi fits into the typical category, rather than exhibiting more jerkiness than many others.

3D noise, as mentioned on the first page, starts with ghosting or crosstalk. DLP projectors are supposed to be crosstalk clean when it comes to crosstalk, so it's not unexpected, that the 3D image looks clean.

In fact, as far as all 3D related artifacts go, the HC7900DW about as good as we've seen.

Audible Noise

Like most DLP home theater projectors (and a few others), the HC7900 projector is a bit noisy when running the lamp at full power. Not too bad, though. I believe Mitsubishi claims 31 db at full power, and that seems about right. The 25db claim for eco-mode also seems about right. The quietest projectors get down to about 16 db in eco-mode (call that silent for all practical purposes). But most home projectors are in the 18-26 db range in eco-mode, and run from about 23 to 33 db at full power.

Bottom line, if you are particularly noise adverse, you won't like the HC7900DW at full power, but then, you also won't like about 75% of the other home theater projectors out there. Not bad, not great, the HC7900DW's audible noise levels are nothing to get excited about - but probably won't be a real issue for you.