The EH-TW6600 offers very solid specifications, one unusual connectivity feature for a projector and new styling. There is also the EH-TW6600W variant, for which you get WirelessHD for cable-free connection. Stephen Dawson reports.

I am so impatient to get my hands on Epson’s new, long-delayed, reflective LCD projector. It is definitely coming soon, but in the meantime, life goes on with its traditional range of LCD projectors. That is, the ones where the light passes through LCD panels rather than reflects from their surfaces.

What it is
Based around three of Epson’s C2Fine 15.5mm full HD LCD panels, the EH-TW6600 projector is rated to produce up to 2,500lm with a very respectable dynamic contrast ratio of 70,000:1. Epson notes that while some projectors are capable of high overall outputs, that’s often at the expense of the colour of the light. Epson’s 2,500lm specification is for neutral white output.

The important thing here in the home theatre context is that a projector that can run at 2,500lm at full power has quite a bit of capacity to do things while maintaining useful brightness. So the projector can still produce plenty of output while running in the lower energy modes and can use a dynamic iris to restrict output when required to stretch the contrast.

The unit offers a useful 1.62:1 zoom lens and both horizontal and vertical lens shift for distortion-free adjustment of the position of the projected picture. This provides it with considerable placement flexibility. There are also readily accessible keystone correction adjustment buttons on the body of the unit. These correct for trapezoidal errors caused by failing to keep the lens perpendicular to the plane of the screen. That should not arise given the other adjustments, and should be avoided if at all possible because this adjustment means wasting panel resolution.

For a 100” screen, the projector needs to be located at a range of between 2.95m and 4.78m.

All the adjustments are manual. The zoom and focus rings on the lens are smooth, while the lens shift ones are a bit clunky and the adjustment of one tends to dislodge the other. But it didn’t take long to nudge the picture into the correct position.

A simple test pattern is invoked by a key on the remote to assist in locating the projected image precisely and to focus it. The focus continued to need a little tweaking for the first couple of hours after installation, drifting a little as the projector settled after transportation and ceiling installation. After that the focus remained steady.

Composite and component and D-SUB15 RGB analogue video inputs are provided, along with two HDMI inputs. One of those supports a Mobile High-definition Link (MHL) signal from compatible phones, typically Android ones. There’s also RS-232C, USB and a trigger output for system integration.

The projector has two built in speakers located on the rear of its body. Each is provided with 10W of power.

The projector supports 3D and comes with two pairs of active 3D glasses. These connect by RF rather than infrared and are rechargeable, lasting up to 40 hours on a full charge. If you forget, there’s a kind of emergency mode by which a three minute quick charge will give the glasses three hours of life, which ought to be enough for a typical 3D movie. A full charge seemed to take not much more than half an hour. The glasses are quite light in weight, coming in at 34g.

The unit supports a WiFi network – for control and the transmission of images – if you purchase the optional dongle. The lamps have a rated longevity of 4,000 or 5,000 hours for the high and eco lamp mode respectively. Replacement lamps are relatively affordable.In use
By default the ‘HDMI Link’ function was switched on. That’s Epson’s name for the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) function of HDMI. It was brought to my attention by the projector switching off my home theatre receiver at certain times. One of those was when I was trying out the ‘MHL’ function.

HDMI 1 supports MHL, which allows certain mobile phones and tablets to be connected. They can charge from the port in addition to passing high definition video and audio. When I plugged my LG phone in, the projector switched off my home theatre receiver and switched on its own speakers to produce the sound from my video. My Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, which supposedly also supports MHL, would not work.

MHL seems to be a ‘standard’ which is lacking much take up through foolish incompatibilities and the unavailability of MHL cables. Search the web for MHL cables and most of what will turn up are actually MHL adaptors, which sell for less than $10 and can be used with standard HDMI inputs.

There were three ‘power consumption’ settings for the projector under the ‘Image’ menu. The output of ‘Medium’ was about 92% of ‘High’, while ‘Eco’ was about 73% of ‘High’. In my darkened office, ‘Eco’ delivered a picture that was very satisfactorily bright, and since it also made for the lowest, and thus quietest, fan speed, that’s what I used most of the time.

It is wonderful to be able to purchase these days a projector at a reasonable price that produces a reliably good, enjoyable full HD picture. That’s certainly what this projector did. The black levels were very nice (and extended by the dynamic iris, which worked almost silently, so I didn’t mind having it switched on). Even in very dark scenes there was a good level of low-light detail, while in scenes of high contrast, the blacks looked positively inky by comparison to the bright areas.

There was excellent alignment between the three colour panels, so that there were no fringes around sharply etched on-screen objects. And the colours themselves were rich and accurate.

Lately I’ve been using a 55” 4K TV as my main viewing platform, so the switch to a 1080p projector on my 83.5” screen could have potentially have resulted in an intolerable softness in the picture by comparison. Yet Epson’s picture processing is very solid.

Most important was the automatic deinterlacing, which preserved optimum detail by almost always choosing the most appropriate deinterlacing strategy. The only failure was a brief instant in my hardest 576i50 test clip, when a pattern of horizontal lines that is part of the proper content was momentarily at the same scale as the 576 scan lines themselves, tricking the software into switching for about two seconds into the wrong mode.

Unlike earlier Epson projectors, there is no ‘Force Film’ deinterlacing mode.

I normally use a couple of standard test scenes to assess the performance of a display’s motion smoothing algorithms. There was no point with this projector though because it doesn’t employ any. I don’t mind that much myself since I prefer to see programs pretty much as they were shot, rather than ‘improved’ by display processing; however, this may put some off since – despite the occasional creation of distortion – these do improve clarity of moving scenes.

The 3D performance was very strong. It was clear that Epson had incorporated its crosstalk cancellation system, which anticipates leakage of the signal through the glasses to the incorrect eyes and provides an inverted signal to almost entirely eliminate that. The result was that the extremely subtle ghosting which remained was virtually invisible. By eliminating that distraction, the projector’s 3D was highly effective, engaging my visual systems with an excellent sense of depth.

When handling a 3D signal, the projector kicks itself from Eco up to Medium lamp brightness, so there’s also additional fan noise. You can of course override to go darker – I wouldn’t recommend that – or brighter.

The projector imposed a little delay on the image – perhaps 70 to 100ms according to my AV sync tests. However it supports the automatic lip sync adjustment available on many home theatre receivers, so it’s worth switching that feature on in your receiver.

Conclusion
The Epson EH-TW6600 is a very good, mid-priced home theatre receiver with strong overall performance, the welcome inclusion of two sets of 3D eyewear, and ought to be very economical to run.