Mitsubishi HC6000 – Better than its predecessor
Mitsubishi HC6000 has good collection of picture controls and it includes Gamma modes. They are really the picture modes along with different curves of gamma. The best preset, for me is Cinema and the two user modes let you do some gamma curve adjustment but I won’t recommend doing this unless you don’t know what you’re doing. There are some selectable color temperatures available and for people who want to calibrate the unit professionally, there is User color temperature. Auto Iris feature lets you open and close the Iris and this depends on the brightness of the scene. I would recommend you to keep this shut off because it causes both the black and while level to shift up/down depending on the content of the picture. Both the white and black needs to correctly set and it has to remain constant too for best picture performance.
Connectivity on the Mitsubishi HC6000 is quite generous considering this is a front projector. There are two HDMI ports which is better than HC500 (its predecessor) which had one DVI and one HDMI port. A 15-pin VGA port and single component video input can be configured for the component video. They are also available here. A single composite video input and single S-Video for the older legacy sources like the VHS decks are there too. Finally, there is a RS-232 control port along with 12 volt trigger.
There is no doubt that the Mitsubishi HC6000 is improved as compared to its predecessor, the 5000. The biggest improvement is the greater contrast ratio and this is mainly due to the improved performance of black level. The blacks here are much deeper than the previous model and it is due to the use of best 1-chip resolution of 1080p for DLP projectors feature technology of Dark Chip. For instance, the JVC DLA-HD100 which is LCoS based is a bit better but the price is twice.
Other highlights on the Mitsubishi HC6000 include good gamma, accurate grayscale tracking, and excellent color decoding. It is a big shame that the secondary and primary color accuracy is beyond the mark and this dilutes the overall color accuracy. The video processing is courtesy of the Silicon Optix and their HQV scheme of processing gives you a lot of quality levels. The de-interlacing is pretty good and this is evident in the Silicon Optix HQV test DVD in Blu-ray. Mitsubishi HC6000 does a good job at both the film based and video based HD material.
