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 April 1, 2005 Epson PowerLite Cinema 500 Projector  Ten
years ago, I was struggling with whether to buy a Sharp LCD or a Runco CRT projector for
my home theater. The CRT had better overall fidelity, but the LCD allowed me to easily
zoom the picture for use with letterboxed laserdiscs, allowing me to fill up my 16:9
screen. What finally killed the deal for the LCD was the awful screen-door effect and all
those pesky, burnt-out pixels. Since then, both Sharp and Runco have switched to DLP for
most of their home-theater displays, but the makers of LCD panels have also fixed most of
the screen-door effect, and come up with a way of minimizing the problem of pixel burnout.
Currently, the hottest high-end LCD projector comes from a company better known for making printers than projectors. Epson’s PowerLite Cinema 500 has almost everything you could possibly ask for at anywhere near its price of $4999 USD: 1280x720 chips, 1200:1 contrast ratio, 1000-lumen brightness, Faroudja’s DCDi and Pixelworks Digital Natural Expression, an HDMI port, and a plethora of setup options. It’s also sparked a lot of buzz among home-theater aficionados about its great picture and ease of use. Oh, so easy to set up Of the projectors I’ve had to set up, the PowerLite Cinema 500 was one of the easiest: Connect the wires, make sure your distance from the screen is right (anywhere from 11 to 17 feet for my 10’-diagonal screen), position the Cinema 500 so that the center of its lens is somewhere between the top and bottom and close to the horizontal center of the screen, square the projector to the screen, and the physical setup is done. No precise measurements are needed because the Cinema 500 has fine adjustments for vertical and horizontal shift as well as power zoom and power focus, all to compensate for minor disparities. The Cinema 500 offers a number of wiring options, including HDMI, RCA component, S-video, and composite inputs. I wish there were two HDMI inputs, so I could use one for my DirecTV HD tuner and one for the Ayre DX-1 DVD transport, but to be fair, I haven’t yet seen a projector that has more than a single HDMI in. Hopefully we’ll soon see multiple HDMIs. The Cinema 500 does have two component inputs, however. Owners of home-theater PCs will flip over the Cinema 500, which has USB, RS-232, and network ports. Using these connections, you can hook up your HTPC and use Epson’s proprietary Cinema Color Editor software, a hot-rodder’s dream that allows you access to every one of the 500’s adjustable parameters. Nonexperts are warned to leave this part alone, but if you have the bucks to hire the best technician CEDIA has to offer, this level of adjustability will make his or her job easy. For the rest of us, the next step will be to focus the Cinema 500. A helpful grid is addressable from the remote control. You can then pop up a whole-screen grid and zoom the picture to fit your screen. Given the level of adjustability, I can’t imagine that anyone would need keystone correction, but it’s there if you want it. Choosing the aspect ratio is made unnecessarily complex by some odd labeling. Epson calls standard 4:3 TV broadcasts Normal, Zoom is their name for letterboxed 4:3 material, and Squeeze indicates anamorphic widescreen material. Epson recommends that you set the Aspect Ratio to Automatic, which usually works for HDMI. They claim this also works for S-video and Video (i.e., composite), but it didn’t. When I watched the old Image Entertainment DVD edition of TheSilence of the Lambs through the S-video input, none of the aspect ratios worked. I finally went to Zoom, which cut about 10% off the picture’s top and bottom but filled out the sides. Confusion compounded by obfuscation. The next choice is of color mode. Epson offers six options for rooms with decreasing amounts of ambient light: Dynamic is for rooms with lots of ambient light, followed by Living Room, Natural, Theatre, and, for a fully darkened room, Theatre Black. From here, Epson offers plenty of flexibility with which you can easily ruin your picture. The positive way to look at this is that the Cinema 500 is flexible enough to conform to your home theater and system. Unless you’re ace at setting up displays -- I mean good enough to remember exactly what Epson’s nonstandard terms mean as you’re trying to figure out what you’re doing -- you should hire someone to do the setup. The best-looking LCD I’ve seen The first film I watched through the PowerLite Cinema 500 was one I’d avoided in the theaters -- wrongly, as it turned out. Man on Fire really grabbed me. (Fans of Nine Inch Nails need to see this film for the best film use ever of Trent Reznor’s music.) Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, and Christopher Walken generate memorable characters in search of human warmth in dangerous times. But Paul Cameron and César Charlone’s cinematography just jumped off the screen in the 720p high-definition mastering I watched on HBO via DirecTV. The extremely dark scenes, with close-ups of Washington’s face against shadowy backgrounds, showed amazing detail with no hint of black crush. Yes, I’ve seen darker blacks, but not from an LCD in my house. In fact, the Cinema 500 delivered blacker blacks than my Runco CRT. Digital pictures played by the Ayre DX-1 looked stunning. The Epson had no problem whatsoever in reproducing a Region 3 copy of House of Flying Daggers, which features actors in costumes covered in geometric patterns gliding past furniture and backdrops with opposing patterns. As usual, animation looked fantastic. Les Triplettes de Belleville, a film I never tire of, had gorgeous, burnished hues and phenomenal detail.
In fact, everything I watched through the Cinema 500 looked gorgeous, as long as there was no fast movement filmed by a panning camera -- as in a fast break in a basketball game, the camera rapidly panning to remaining fixed on the person with the ball. Here is where the screen-door effect finally reared its head, manifesting as an odd, dusty quality. The problem was troublesome with HD material but was downright intrusive with 480i images. That single grumble aside, while Epson has not completely eliminated the problem, the Cinema 500 had the least amount of screen-door effect I’ve seen from an LCD projector. The other big LCD bugbear has apparently been eliminated, however. In the few months I had the PowerLite Cinema 500, not a single pixel died. Comparison shopping: Is it for you? There are two main competitors in this price range, and they boil down to fundamental choices. If I were shopping, I’d also be sure to try out the Sony HS-51, which costs about $1200 less than the Cinema 500 and has better contrast specs, though you’ll give up brightness, power options, and range of adjustment. While I haven’t lately dealt with Sony support, I can tell you that my test call to Epson turned up fast, intelligent service. All things considered, I still favor DLP over LCD for one reason: contrast ratio. In my room, to my eyes, DLPs still reveal a greater difference between white and black than any LCD, and Texas Instruments’ chips are rapidly catching up with the CRT, the holy grail of contrast. The gold standard in my house, to date, is the InFocus 7205, fed by the Ayre DX-1 and the DirecTV TiVo HR10-250. That said, the world is full of folks who seem to have problems with DLP’s rainbows, though I’m not one of them. But the Cinema 500 smokes the rest of the competition with its combination of setup ease and flexibility, picture clarity, brightness, and price -- it’s a lot of projector for $4999. For those driven crazy by DLP rainbows, right now the Epson PowerLite Cinema 500 is the best front projector you can buy for under $5000. …Wes Marshall Epson PowerLite Cinema 500 LCD Projector. Epson Website: www.epson.com
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