Epson Home Cinema 3800 4K Projector

Update: I upgraded my receiver to a Yamaha 385 and my HTPC graphics card to a Geforce 1650 and a couple 8k rated 3ft hdmi cables for the computer and my PS4. NOW I am running full 4k HDR signal from my computer and not surprisingly I had to re-calibrate the picture. It looked terrible with the settings I had set up for the 1080p SDR signal. Even resetting everything to default wasn’t great. Here’s what I ended up with:
Brightness=44 Contrast=24 Color Saturation=55 Color Temp=8 GMCorrection=4

With the 4k HDR signal I did not need to adjust the RGBCMY levels at all, default values gave me a well balanced color chart (from calibration disc) with no color clipping at the high end like it did with the SDR signal.

I still have my top 4 white levels turned down because they’re too bright, but I think I figured out how to deal with that better. Apparently 4k HDR projectors perform better with a lower gain grey-screen which would make blacks darker and help tone down the intensity of the white levels. I plan on upgrading to a Qualgear 120″ High Contrast Gray screen at 0.9 Gain, with tensioners to keep the surface as flat as possible. I have a few areas of my screen that are not focused right, and I suspect it might be due to the wall not being truly flat. Also, it’s almost impossible to get as smooth of a surface as the tensioned screens using latex paint on a wall. So hanging a new low gain tensioned screen will give me multiple improvements at once as well as a bonus of maxing out my screen size potential at my given throw distance. Going from 104″ to a 120″ should be quite noticeably larger and hopefully make better use of this projectors incredibly bright image.

In light of all this I’ve bumped my rating from 4 to 5 stars. I absolutely love it and am glad I wend 3LCD over a new DLP. Even 1080p video upscaled on my computer looks far better than it did on my old 1080p DLP projector. It’s considerably better than the projector’s own 4k upscaling. Watching 4k HDR video is amazing! My wife didn’t think she would notice the difference and I proved her wrong. She loves it too and now isn’t as mad at me for spending so much on the upgrades. LOL…

Original review for 1080 SDR input:
Just got this a few days ago and decided to leave a review now that I have it all setup and calibrated. First of all my setup is in a smallish light-controlled home theater with a 104″ DIY screen on the wall painted with a pure white matte latex that should provide about 1.0 gain, and surrounded with trim covered in black felt. Dark walls and a dark vaulted ceiling which extends far above the top of my screen. Projector throw distance is about 11′ 6″.

First impressions were just how much larger this unit is than my old DLP projector, easily more than twice as big and required me to purchase a new ceiling mount with arms capable of spanning about 14″ diagonal for the mounting screw locations and supporting the roughly 15lbs of weight. I chose the QualGear PRB-717-WHT mount which fit my needs well and worked great on my vaulted ceiling.

My mounting height was never right on my DLP projector which forced me to angle it a bit and use keystone correction to fix the out-of-square result. The problem with using keystone is that it does distort your image a little in order to make it appear square. This Epson projector has so much lens shift up and down and side to side that you ideally should not ever need to use keystone. I just kept adjusting the angle of the projector and shifting the image back onto my screen until I got the image all squared up, no keystone required!

I bought a new 30ft fiber HDMI 2.0b cable to run from my receiver unit to the projector, which works well. However my receiver and my theater PC currently only support 1080p output. Now that I have a 4k HDR10 capable projector, I plan to shell out another $500 to upgrade my graphics card and receiver unit. So as a disclaimer, I have not yet tested this projector with a true 4k HDR signal. However it’s proven very adept at upscaling my 1080p signal with 4k enhancement that is clearly superior to my old 1080p DLP projector.

Out of box settings were very impressive, but extremely bright and over-saturated in my short throw light-controlled theater. Even turning the projector down with ECO mode still had blaring bright whites and eye popping color saturation, specifically reds and blues.

Calibrating the unit….

VERY FIRST THING TO DO: After getting projector mounted, adjusted and focused, and switched into ECO mode, you should do a panel alignment. This lets you accurately adjust the alignment between the red, green, and blue images on your screen and is critical to producing an accurate image and should be done before you adjust anything else. Green panel is not adjustable, you just have to adjust red and blue panels to align with the green one. I suggest switching the color mode to match which color you are adjusting rather than leaving the other color also showing. This will help you see where the lines are at. Adjust each corner first, then look around the screen at all the intersections for any misalignment until you can no longer see the red or blue lines diverging anywhere on the screen.

For the rest of the calibrations, I used the AVS Calibration disc you can download from their website. First you set brightness using the flashing black bar screens, then adjust contrast with the flashing white/grey bar screen. Those will tune in your grey scale settings which are the basis of any image being displayed correctly and completely. Then you have to adjust your color settings. I did this with the Advanced> RBGCMY setting and the corresponding color bar chart from the calibration disc. Yellow and cyan bars were fine, showing clear delineation all the was up the scale. Red, green, blue, and magenta colors were clipped at the top bar and required reducing their saturation levels individually until the top bar had a clear delineation between it and the next bar. I didn’t change Hue or Brightness settings (default is 50). Once these were all adjusted the resulting picture looked much more natural and balanced with full grey scale details from white all the way to the very deep blacks that this projector can display.

I still had one issue though, the whites were unbearably bright. Eye scorching to the point that very bright scenes or bright objects in a dark scene where not comfortable to watch and would definitely lead to eye fatigue, not to mention how distracting it was to the rest of the image. LUCKILY, I found that this projector offers a way to control this intensity in a way I have not seen before. Under the White Balance settings, you have color temp which I set to 7, G-M Correction which I set to 0, Custom which I didn’t touch, and finally Grayscale which is where you need to go to tone down the brightness of whites on the screen. This gives you 8 levels of white to adjust, 1 being the darkest and 8 being 100% white. I turned levels 6 thru 8 down to -50 (as far as you can go), and level 5 I set it to -20, 1 thru 4 I left at full brightness. This resulted in a dramatically more enjoyable viewing experience and reduced eye strain.

Here’s my what I ended up with for the main settings:
Brightness: 53
Contrast: 7
Color Saturation: default (individual saturation set with RGBCMY settings for better saturation balance)
Tint: default
Sharpness: All 0
Color Temp: 7
GM Correction:0
Grayscale: levels 8-6 @ -50, level 5 @ -20, levels 1-4 @ 0
Noise Reduction:15
MPEG Noise Reduction: 2
Super-resolution and Detail Enhancement: default values
RGBCMY saturation adjustments: R=30 G=40 B=30 C=50 M=30 Y=50. (default is 50)

Conclusions: I am very happy with this projector so far and am glad that there are adequate adjustment settings to get it dialed in because it really was not acceptable with the out of the box settings. I’m still not sure why the whites were so dang bright even in eco mode. White objects were almost blinding and made me feel like I had double vision and a hard time focusing on the screen. Luckily the greyscale settings helped fix that. It almost could use a setting lower than -50 for the top 3 white levels. I am absolutely loving the new level of detail and the complete lack of rainbow effect that I had experienced with the DLP projectors, it’s one of the main reasons I bought this Epson rather than a newer 4K DLP projector from Optoma. I am excited to get the rest of my system upgraded to HDR10 level so I can experience the full potential of this projector, but for now even with a 1080p input it is blowing my old DLP out of the water on picture quality.

At First, I will be honest, after reading a lot of reviews and having this show up brand new with 2 small pits and a scratch on a brand new lens with a premium price, I was a bit …concerned. HOWEVER, I set it up anyway, (after using a new lens cloth I use for photography to wipe what I thought at first was maybe a small streak of oil or something from the manufacturing process). -I’mean, it comes with a lens cap. O_o? How in the name of all that is holy or monstrous can you not perhaps be gentle with optics during assembly or handling or Even QC and not notice a pretty decent scratch on a brand new UHD projector’s MAIN OUTPUT METHOD.? Ugh..
But, with all that said, I turned it on and tried to find any aberrations with the picture using various methods and all I got was delicious eye candy. And, as this projector gives you 3 settings of brightness, after switching to the already quiet, stock Medium setting to ECO, it was downright silent. ( Projector was set up -just- behind my head as well for testing purposes ). It is a Very bright, crisp and silent projector.
The very first day I had it on and was focusing it, I did notice once the center was in perfect clear focus, the right bottom side of the screen was just slightly not. But, having used the Epson 9200 Pro and loving that for nearly 5 years, I gave this new beast a try. Somehow, after 4 hours of use on the first day,
the second day I had a hard time trying to find the once ‘a little softer’ parts of the screen. * I have Zero Idea if “burn-in” applies to projectors of this sort with the sensor or other elements, but the slightly ‘softer’ right bottom side cleared up and all I got was an extremely beautiful and engaging 4K picture with wonderful contrast and an extremely quiet and quick auto iris for even deeper blacks. ~Joy~
I ran through a bunch of basic tests using both video and Xbox One X games and just got lost in the detail and rendering of what the console and Projector are capable of.
It is, for sure, a treat for the eyes. Current screen is matte white, 100″ at about 11ft (in a light controlled room), but zoomed as large as it could go just to check pixels and it was still crisp and clear and looked like a 100″ , 200LB 4K led display. . . but this you can throw in a large backpack and not hire a crew to move it. ~ Also Joy ~
SO, in short, I have no regrets purchasing this and am still sort of in awe of the overall quality upgrade.

I’m still a bit unsure about the process of ‘out-the-door QC’ at that particular plant, but truth be told, ~ Unlike a camera lens Receiving light Into it, perhaps shooting light Out of a lens at a distance of 10 – 15+ ft onto a screen/wall is a completely different animal. And perhaps Epson knows this. (?)

Thankfully, and weirdly, it does not effect picture. No idea why.
But, I do start my new job as a Rocket Surgeon soon so maybe will have some answers then.

I have no plans to return it as it otherwise works flawlessly so far. So even with the slight blemish, she’s a keeper 😉