Details on the MITSUBISHI HD4000u:
The HD4000U WXGA widescreen DLP projector is the first projector that is truly developed for media and entertainment centers. When you want to be able to browse the Internet and view your computer on the big screen, right along with movies and HDTV, this projector has a perfect combination of resolution, versatility, and brightness. Its native widescreen resolution of 1280 x 768 allows you to display your HD video or TV content in its native 720P format. And you can also show the full screen displays of the new wave of 16:9 widescreen computers. It's ideal for movies, TV sports, gaming, web-surfing, and all multimedia applications at home. There are now several 16:9 projectors targeting home theater users, an indication of increased demand for good video. Yet, with today's more sophisticated image processing technology, there's less reason for manufacturers to choose between moving images and slides and spreadsheets. Mitsubishi's HD4000 projector features BrilliantColor color-wheel technology to help achieve high-contrast video for use in boardrooms and public venues. Mitsubishi's newest 16:9 projector, the HD4000, is designed to do both. It's built on Texas Instruments' line-doubling DDP3020 DLP TrueVision and BrilliantColor image processing technology and can produce very nice-looking video for the price. Yet, the HD4000's chassis design hints more at business usage than the typical sleekly curved, jet-black or chrome home theater unit. And, indeed, that is Mitsubishi's goal. In the modern era of 16:9 flat panels, Mitsubishi sees real demand for a capable 16:9 model that is comfortable with both motion video and other types of business material. That flexibility makes the HD4000 a good solution for a boardroom, public signage, or an entertainment or nightclub venue that needs to show a variety of content - or simply a more brightly lit studio that needs more light output than the typical home theater projector provides. The HD4000's design is familiar and its connectivity options fairly typical, except it does have both an HDMI port and component video in. Manual zoom/focus lens and manual keystone adjustment are typical, although vertical digital lens shift makes installation easy. One Auto-Power function automatically boots the projector on power to the power cord, allowing one or more units to be used with a power strip, and a second function powers it down after a selected time-out period. A 12V trigger-out can be used to activate other equipment when the HD4000 lamp is lit. The projector also offers several video setup features to help achieve the best moving pictures, including shutter speed adjustments, clamps, gamma presets and manual configuration, color temperature presets and individual RGB color temperature configuration, and a variety of 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio and screen size options. Yet, it's the BrilliantColor technology that makes the HD4000 stand out from other projectors on the market, and even from Mitsubishi's previous BrilliantColor-equipped models. BrilliantColor technology typically includes both a physically different color wheel and improved color-blending algorithms. Most often, but not necessarily always, BrilliantColor adds secondary colors (sometimes called additional primary colors) to the color wheel. "Multiple primaries" afford more lamp light on a wider range of colors, although potentially less light - and, therefore, brightness - on saturated reds, greens, or blues. TI argues that additional primaries can be used even when processing most shades of red, green, and blue, thereby broadening the overall range of rich colors, but the caveat can be increased dithering. Given both arguments, Mitsubishi has given the HD4000's BrilliantColor three possible settings: 0 (off), 1, or 2 (full on). The HD4000 uses a five-segment RGBWY color wheel, which again hints at business usage more than home theater. Why? Because while the white and yellow segments admittedly add richness to yellows and skin tones, they are ultimately more about adding brightness and contrast in public spaces with more ambient light. I found few instances when turning BrilliantColor off improved the picture - possibly excepting a very dark room, in which case, turning the light off 30 percent to 40 percent of the time is less critical. I measured brightness at a mere 498 ANSI lumens with BrilliantColor off and contrast at 675:1 (full on/off). Switching BrilliantColor to 1, then 2, noticeably increased the brightness in yellows, skins tones, brighter grays, and whites, but did not affect darker colors. In many cases, the added contrast made "2" the preferable setting, particularly amid more ambient light, although "2" also caused slightly unnatural color dithering and effective color bleed in some scenes. The "1" and "2" settings increased brightness to 665 and 1197 lumens and contrast to 882:1 and 1504:1, respectively. (A "high-brightness" color temperature preset further increased brightness to 1507, still shy of Mitsubishi's 2000 claim.) More interestingly, according to my ColorFacts colorimeter, switching BrilliantColor settings smoothed the grayscale tracking with each step. That's a good argument for using BrilliantColor. Not surprisingly, an otherwise very consistent 6500K color temperature also decreased slightly with each step change. I was also extremely pleased with the HD4000's uniformity, both brightness uniformity, which ranged from 86 percent to 90 percent depending on BrilliantColor setting (2 being the best), and color temperature consistency across the picture and across the full grayscale range. The HD4000 also adeptly synched to a variety of resolutions and frequencies from an Extron VTG-400 test generator. At just less than $3,000, the HD4000 demands a bit of a premium for the native 16:9 aspect ratio, but not much. But it also pays it back with many setup and configuration options that should serve a variety of users well, particularly balancing the needs of traditional business source material with an increasing desire to get the video right. |
