Epson has brought its reflective LCD technology back to market and Stephen Dawson was happy to try it out.

Back in 2010 Epson launched a new series of projectors based on reflective LCD technology. Then, strangely, they disappeared, with vague suggestions of manufacturing difficulties.

But now, finally, Epson’s reflective LCD technology is back in the EH-LS10000. That’s not all. The new projector also uses a laser light source and includes something called ‘4K Enhancement’.

What it is

In normal LCD projectors the light from a lamp is split into three colours, and each is passed through a separate LCD panel. The pixels on each panel are opaque or transparent according to the signal. In this context ‘opaque’ is a relative term. Completely blocking the light from passing through a pixel has proved difficult, making the production of full blacks impossible. Also, since the light passes through the panel, all the microscopic wiring gets in the way.

Reflective LCD is better at both producing bright whites – the microscopic wiring and control electronics can hide behind the reflective surface – and dark blacks, since the reflective surface is changing the direction at which the light is reflected, not trying to black it altogether. The EH-LS10000 uses three full HD reflective panels.

It also offers a ‘4K Enhancement’ mode, in which the panels can be shifted rapidly in a diagonal direction by half a pixel in distance. The idea is that the number of points in the display grid is doubled, allowing for smoother edges. Even though, as we will see, this isn’t properly 4K display technology, this projector can still accept full 4K signals, even in 50p and 60p.

In a third major departure the projector uses two light sources, neither of which involves filaments and round glass objects. This is a laser fired projector. These typically work by firing laser diodes at a phosphor bed which is designed to produce an intense light in a planned range of wavelengths. This projector uses two banks of 41.9mW diodes, one set triggering blue light production, the other yellow. The yellow is subsequently split into the actually required red and green.

Instead of two, three or four thousand hours of operation, this light source is rated at 30,000 hours of operation in ‘Eco’ mode. And instead of taking time to warm up to the right colour temperature, and to fade away when switched off, this light source can respond instantly.

To put that 30,000 hours in context, you could use it for four hours a day for 20 years. You’re unlikely to need to replace it.

All of that is packed into a large, organically shaped enclosure. It’s a solid thing, weighing over 17kg. The usual inputs are provided, including two for HDMI. Control facilities are available via LAN or RS-232C connections and the projector has two trigger outputs.

The control panel is hidden away on a pod that appears when pressed. A full function remote control is included. The projector supports 3D and comes with two sets of active 3D glasses. These are charged via USB and have a fast charge mode. They sync to the projector wirelessly.

All the physical things in the projector are driven by motors: focus, zoom, horizontal and vertical lens shift, and even the lens cap. The adjustments are generously wide. The zoom range is 2.1:1. For a 100” screen the projector can be located anywhere from 2.83m to 6.04m from the screen.

In use

One of the great things about laser diode-excited light sources is their very fast start up time. This projector was fast in one respect, slow in another. Fast: it took about six and a half seconds from hitting the power key for the Epson logo to appear on the screen, apparently at full brightness with the correct colour balance. But overall it took 28 seconds to get actual content on the screen. Much of the additional time was spent on simply syncing to the signal.

This was indeed somewhat of a weakness with this projector. At one point I installed a Western Digital Live TV media box and wanted to change its output resolution. But this asks for confirmation when you do that and if it fails to receive it in a few seconds, it reverts to the original format. I never had the chance to confirm because I couldn’t get a picture back in time. In the end I plugged a TV into the WD unit, changed the resolution, and then plugged it back into the projector.

The image took 9.5 seconds to reappear when I changed the input resolution from 576p to 576i. It took 10.5 seconds to go from 576i to 1080p. There are a number of confirmation-seeking devices that may have the same problem as the WD unit did.

The black levels were extremely good with this projector. Viewing particular Blu-ray scenes I use to assess this, plus some test patterns I’ve created, the black levels were beautifully inky, with the lit images floating in a sea of just about nothing. It was an impressive performance indeed, and I think pretty much the best I’ve seen. Bear in mind, this was with Dynamic Contrast switched off. So, beautiful results, but not ‘Absolute Black’. You can still stick your hand in front of a full black section of the screen and cast a shadow. A weak one to be sure, thanks to the excellent blacks. Nonetheless, it is showing that the blacks are not absolute.

But what about that Dynamic Contrast control? It is in the same menu position that control of the Dynamic Iris occupies in some of Epson’s other projectors, but this is not an iris that it controls. Instead it is the light output that is under control.

With this switched off, when the projector is displaying a full black image, the light output remains the same. But with it switched to ‘Normal’ or to ‘High Speed’, if the image goes full black the light actually switches off completely. And in that case it really is absolute black. You can look straight into the lens and it will look as though the projector is switched off. The difference between ‘Normal’ and ‘High Speed’ is that the first ramps down the output over five seconds, while the other switches off the output instantly (and back on again when image content returns).

Again using test patterns, this ability to vary the light output did not seem to be employed in dark scenes where most of the screen was full black and al the picture elements were barely brighter than full black.

With a strong black performance, the colours were also first class. There are options for tweaking them, and if you’re particularly keen you can get in an Imaging Sciences Foundation calibrator to set up the reserved picture modes.

It’s tempting to think that simply by moving pixels rapidly between different places you can produce a 4K image with only a 2K physical display resolution. But there’s a problem with this thinking: By necessity, each pixel on a 2K display must be big enough to almost entirely fill the area you’d expect a 2K pixel to occupy. Indeed, thanks to the reflective technology Epson has developed, the pixels in this projector fill a larger proportion of the grid space than previous ones because the control electronics can sit behind the pixel surface, not getting in the way, allowing thinner pixel borders.

So when a pixel is shifted, it doesn’t really fill in blank space. It partially overlaps other pixels. That could, performed with exquisite sensitivity on a pixel by pixel basis allow some gentle correction of potentially visible jaggies.

That does not seem to be the case here. I was constantly perturbed by the very soft menus with this projector, and felt that both SD and HD weren’t quite as sharp as I am used to.

I eventually worked out what was going on. I was using ‘Cinema’ mode, but didn’t like the ‘ringing’ around the edges of objects, a clear giveaway of picture edge ‘enhancement’ that actually makes the picture edgy and harsh. I had turned it down in the ‘Detail Enhancement’ section of the menu, and while removing the harshness, the picture went excessively soft.

Exploring further, I found the ‘Super-resolution/4K Enhancement’ section of the menus. This has five positions without 4K and five positions with it, plus ‘Off’. It turned out that the ‘Cinema’ picture mode defaults to ‘4K-3’, but the 1 through 5 modifiers were simply shortcuts for different levels of edge enhancement. By turning that down to zero, I’d revealed the 4K enhancement without any corrective processing, and the result was to make the picture noticeable softer than with 4K switched off.

In short, with the 4K mode on it requires the detail enhancement processing on to correct ifs softening effect. I found having Super-Resolution/4K Enhancement switched off completely produced a cleaner, more attractive picture.

The 3D performance was extremely impressive. There was effectively no visible ghosting. Oh, when I paused scenes and looked very carefully I could find hints of it, but it has the character of the remnants of 3D ghosts which had been cancelled out (will the cleverness of home entertainment electronics designers never end?).

Gamers should pay attention to the settings. The projector supports automatic AV sync, and told the Yamaha receiver I was using to set an audio delay of some 242ms. Just about a quarter of a second. I confirmed that when the projector is doing heavy duty processing – especially frame interpolation to smooth motion – it does delay things by this much. But switch the processing from ‘Fine’ to ‘Fast’ (under ‘Advanced’ in the ‘Signal’ menu) and the delay drops to a far more gamer-friendly 57ms.

Conclusion

I am far from sold on this 4K enhancement thing, but it doesn’t really matter. What does is that the black levels and colour levels are simply excellent, and the super long life of this projector’s lamp means running costs are essentially limited to power consumption.

Truly, the EH-LS10000 is an impressive home theatre projector.