Mitsubishi HC1500 720p DLP Home Theater Projector

Hi Everyone,
I got this HC1500 projector after months of research and read till my mind was spinning. They all said this unit was great. So I got it to see for my self. WOW! was my first responds. Everyone in the room was in SHOCK! No rainbow effect, beautiful HD picture quality, No Noise from the projector. I hung it with the Vantage mount as stated and it went up just fine.

I was worried about the black color output, and if it was going to be washed out. The black and colors are great! You don't need a gray screen or wall with gray tones at all.

I am using my family-room wall at 14 feet throw distance. I got a 120 inch screen. Please plug in your projector and adjust it's location before you mount it for the best picture for your room.

DON'T WORRY ABORT USING GOO OR ANY OTHER SCREEN PAINT!

After you setup your projector you will see it looks good on the wall,
but to add brightness and save your bulb.
Check for major scratches and holds in the wall.
Patch them with drywall compound and sand smooth.

Use standard paint rollers for application and make sure you roll out any streaks. DON"T LET STREAKS DRY!

Paint wall with KILZ If you had wholes to fix, so that the compound wont drink up you paint.

If you do not have to fix the wall, you don't need to paint with the KILZ.

Mount and Turn On your Project,
Set it and the screen size you want.

Use blue scotch removable tape to go around the edges of the projected screen on the wall.

Use paint listed below to paint in your wall screen.

I have researched what to use on my wall and found that
using Home Depot BEHR Ultra Pure Flat white really works great, because you can use the low lamp light to extend your bulb's life to 3000+ hours.

Let dry for 2 hours or 4 hours if you are in a really damp area.

Then I toped the white coat of paint with Lowes VALSPAR Signature Colors Quart of "Clear Coat Flat", Item #64675 at lowes.

The clear flat will help brighten the picture using low lamp light. Remember to paint it "over top" of your BEHR White Flat Coat.

Let Dry, and WHAT DID I TELL YOU ! Looks Great huh!

Finally to really make your screen even brighter looking and POP Out at you, Attach cloth black velvet border on a thin, 2 inch wide wood strip around the screen you painted on the wall. Nice!

I have watched HD TV, Blueray Movies, and Played HD Video games and WOW!

This HC1500 Projector did what it said it could do and it looks just as good as a $5,000 model I was looking at.

Bye, It's Time to watch another Blueray Movie.

This projector may not look as sleek as other pricier projectors, but unlike others, this projector makes up for looks with picture. It provides an amazing viewing experience at a low cost for a projector. Has a very bright picture and produces the sharpest image I've ever seen. Very easy menu, set up takes less than 5 minutes. Best projector I've seen.

works great image is real great and does not make so much noise. menus are easy as well.

Fantastic picture, especially for the price (under $800). With such a good picture - bright, sharp and clean - there's no reason to spend a ton of $$$$ on a 1080p projector. I am able to use this projector in a media room with some light creeping in, and the picture still looks great. One small complaint - every now and then when switching sources (using HDMI for Cable DVR, component for DVD, and RCA for VCR...) it displays a blue screen instead of the picture, and I have to press the input button again to get it to acquire the picture. Can't beat the price, though... I haven't seen a DLP projector with a nicer picture for under $2000.

I originally purchased the Mitsubishi HC1500 DLP projector, but had some problems with it. Ordered this one from amazon and put them side by side. This isn't a review so much as a comparison between 3 Chip LCD and SINGLE CHIP DLP (which tend to be in the same price range). I actually liked the HC1500 a lot, but ended up keeping this SONY VLPAW10 for a number of reasons. It's not perfect, and in some areas underperforms the DLP. Here's the comparison.

Single chip DLP projectors create images by having a "chip" filled with thousands of tiny mirrors (1 per pixel on the screen) that can tilt up and down. When they tilt, they send light to the screen, when they don't tilt, the light stays in the projector. This ends up creating wonderfully bright and brilliant images. The only problem with this setup is that there's no color (just the white light is being directed) so the color needs to be introduced by spinning a color wheel in front of the chip. (in this case it's a 7 segment red-green-blue-white-red-green-blue wheel. The problem is that the colors are therefore being created via an optical illusion, which for some people creates a "rainbow" effect where they see color rainbows in the white areas of the image. It's very pronounced when there are credit rolls at the end of movies, or any other times there are high contrast black/white (or light/dark) areas. In a certain percentage of cases, the rainbow effect causes headaches and eyestrain It did so for me. (google "DLP rainbow effect" if you don't believe me. There are such things as 3 chip DLP projectors that don't need the color wheels and don't create this effect, but they aren't even close to being in the sub $1000 price range (they start at SEVERAL thousand dollars)

Three chip LCD screens actually have 3 panels (red green and blue) so they don't need the spinning color wheel, they just project the light through the panels, and the colors line up on the screen if calibrated properly. They are not as bright and brilliant as the DLP images because the light is going through the panels, and not being reflected by mirrors which create more direct light. The LCD projectors also need more space between the pixels than DLP, and this ends up giving you a more visible "screen door"effect where you can actually see the faint black lines of the pixel grid if you sit close enough to the screen (as if you were looking through a door or window with an insect screen on it, hence the term "screen door".

So that's the background, here are the results of my side by side tests (accompanied by the media manager for a major lecture hall at an Ivy League university) who is a specialist in these kinds of things (I myself teach video production, so have some expertise here as well).

The Mitsubishi HC-1500 (1 chip DLP)

Advantages

+ about half the physical size of the SONY.
+ Image is brighter
+ colors are more saturated
+ no need for air filter
+ less screen door effect

Disadvantages

- potential for rainbow effect
- noisy (the spinning wheel makes a high pitched whine which is louder and more annoying than the fan)
- If you have a small room, you may not be able to fill a large projector screen with an image because this projector cannot throw a large image from as short a distance as the sony

The SONY VLPAW-10 (3 chip LCD)

Advantages

+ no rainbow effect
+ quieter
+ can throw larger image from shorter distance

Disadvantages

- Much larger than the mitsubishi
- Bulb not as bright, need darker room
- colors are less saturated
- has an air filter than needs to be changed periodically
- more screen door effect
- HDMI input on the rear has a bezel around it that will make it impossible for some of the cables with thicker ends to fit in. I had to change cables to get this to work


CONCLUSION

I went with the SONY. It's not perfect, but for my needs it beats the Mitsubishi. I know there are a lot of die hard fans of the HC1500 and I'm sorry - but this is a fair assessment of my needs.

Some ways to mitigate the SONY's disadvantages:

Neither tv will perform great in a bright room, so both of these are really best suited for rooms where you can control the light.

In terms of the saturation, if you're watching DVD movies, then I think you'll prefer the LCD since it creates more natural colors. The DLP is better for watching HDTV shows where the colors really pop (like CSI Miami). I use it mostly to watch movies, so don't mind the less saturated and brilliant colors.

In terms of the "screen door" effect, I find this is minimized by defocusing the image just a hair. Yes the image is more soft, but this looks more like a projected image in a movie theater, and this is the effect I'm going for when watching movies on my projector, so it works great. It does not work as well to watch sports or news or other material that has lots of CG text up on the screen.


One last note, if you decide to buy it, the price of the sony does fluctuate on Amazon wildly ($799 yesterday, $999 today !!!). But I see it go up and down on an almost weekly basis. So time your purchase carefully!