Replaced Infocus 4805 with Mits HC1500 - My thoughts

[Keith from Canada]

Hey all.

I just got my HC1500 and set it up on the floor while my old 4805 (800 hours on bulb and professionally calibrated 1 month ago) was still mounted on the ceiling. The HC1500 will be replacing the 4805 this weekend but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to compare the two units. Besides, my 4805 is professionally calibrated so I used it to do a quick and dirty calibration on the Mits.

Here are my impressions in order of how they 'hit me':

1) holy light canon! The Mits can really pump it out and made the 4805 look very dim indeed. My screen (96" BOC) jumped to life when I switched to the Mits. This was after I set brightness to get better black levels. It's clear that a properly calibrated image on the Mits will be much brighter ('punchier'/more 3D) than it is on the 4805.

2) Sharpness - The 4805 had a noticably soft image and it's one of the things that 'bugged' me about it ('bugged' being a relative term as I really like the 4805). The Mits was very sharp. Text on the screen had 'hard' lines and looked much 'crisper' than on the 4805.

3) Colors - This is probably the biggest difference between the two units. Colors seem far richer on the Mits and it seemed capable of producing more of them. On several scenes in SW Episode 2 there were colors that appeared that simply weren't there (or noticable) on the 4805. Due to the added brightness of the Mits, things like explosions had a far more 3D effect than on the 4805. Also, deep colors (e.g. dark reds, greens and blues) were much 'richer' on the Mits. In other words, they stood out more and made the image appear more 3D.

4) Detail - This one was entirely expected - details in HD were far more pronounced with the Mits. Lines on people's faces, imperfections in make-up...virtually everything seemed sharper and crisper with the Mits. My HD-DVD's really shined (sp) on the Mits. Unfortunately, there was no HD hockey last night (I am Canadian eh!) but there was baseball (yech!). The players and field were far more detailed on the Mits than the 4805 (as they should be).

5) Upconversion - This is an oversight on my part more than anything else. I never hooked my Toshiba HD A30 to the 4805 via HDMI (only component). As such, I was only feeding it a 480p signal. Now I had my 22AWG HDMI cable from Monoprice (which really is close to the thickness of a garden hose!!!) and hooked it in to the Mits (set to 1080i). WOW! My regular DVD's look much better and come close to what I'm seeing with my HD DVD's. I didn't realize how much of a difference a good upconverting player could make until I saw it on my 96" screen!

6) SD material (cable sources) - This was the last thing that I checked out and probably my biggest surprise of the night. I fully expected the 4805 to best the Mits on SD material...it did not. I would say that they were about equal. Unfortunately, I had spent my entire night viewing HD sources or upconverted DVD's until this point so there was a serious "ugggghhhh" factor when switching over to SD cable material. Yes, it sucked but it was equally 'watchable' on both projectors. This is good because my 4 year old daughter spends most of her projector time watching Scooby Doo and Kim Possible from our PVR.

Parting thoughts -- I loved having the 4805 but it's clear that it's aging. I judge my upgrades based on whether or not it makes me want to watch my entire movie collection over again - the 4805 did that over a year ago and the Mits did it again last night. My other big benchmark is my wife's impression. She is far from a videophile and her first words were..."wow, I can really see the difference".

Consider me one happy camper!!!

[Mike P.]

It's nice to hear a hands on comparison. It's obvious from your review the HC1500 is the better of the two. Just think if the HC1500 was calibrated like the 4805 was!

[Keith from Canada]

Mike P. wrote:

It's nice to hear a hands on comparison. It's obvious from your review the HC1500 is the better of the two. Just think if the HC1500 was calibrated like the 4805 was!

The Mits gets its calibration in October. A long wait to be sure but worth it!

[Blaser]

Keith from Canada wrote:

3) Colors - This is probably the biggest difference between the two units. Colors seem far richer on the Mits and it seemed capable of producing more of them. On several scenes in SW Episode 2 there were colors that appeared that simply weren't there (or noticable) on the 4805. Due to the added brightness of the Mits, things like explosions had a far more 3D effect than on the 4805. Also, deep colors (e.g. dark reds, greens and blues) were much 'richer' on the Mits. In other words, they stood out more and made the image appear more 3D.

The mits seems to have more dynamic range

5) Upconversion - This is an oversight on my part more than anything else. I never hooked my Toshiba HD A30 to the 4805 via HDMI (only component). As such, I was only feeding it a 480p signal. Now I had my 22AWG HDMI cable from Monoprice (which really is close to the thickness of a garden hose!!!) and hooked it in to the Mits (set to 1080i). WOW! My regular DVD's look much better and come close to what I'm seeing with my HD DVD's. I didn't realize how much of a difference a good upconverting player could make until I saw it on my 96" screen!

Yeah. It makes night and day differnce! Avoiding DAC then ADC by hooking an HDMI cable keeps a lot more details and sharpness.

6) SD material (cable sources) - This was the last thing that I checked out and probably my biggest surprise of the night. I fully expected the 4805 to best the Mits on SD material...it did not. I would say that they were about equal. Unfortunately, I had spent my entire night viewing HD sources or upconverted DVD's until this point so there was a serious "ugggghhhh" factor when switching over to SD cable material. Yes, it sucked but it was equally 'watchable' on both projectors. This is good because my 4 year old daughter spends most of her projector time watching Scooby Doo and Kim Possible from our PVR.

Same here, I thought the Epson TW-2000 would not be better than a business projector. Anyway the key is contrast ratio, brightness... comes before resolution.

Consider me one happy camper!!!

That's great
We would like to see few screenshots!

[Keith from Canada]

blaser wrote:

We would like to see few screenshots!

I'm going to take a crack at screenshots. I took some in the past and boy...did they come out poorly! I have a newer camera now so we'll see how that goes.

[chas]

Any updates on the 1500?

[Keith from Canada]

The only update is that I've blown my expected bulb usage out of the water big time! I figured I'd be downstairs for 1-2 hours every other night at most. I find myself putting the kids to bed and spending 3-4 hours per night in my basement in HT nirvana! Hockey is almost over (I LOVE hockey on a 96" screen in HD), I'm slowly running out of movies to watch and the summer is here so that should curb my usage for a while...until football season!

Oh yeah, my daughter loves Kim Possible and Scooby Doo on the projector. I find myself burning a few bulb hours per week watching kids programming.

[Blaser]

Same here...Using my projector a lot, I am pretty sure the bulb won't last many years.

[chas]

Any rainbow issues?

[Keith from Canada]

chas wrote:

Any rainbow issues?

Scrolling text only -- Really the only time I've seen them is during the intro scene to the Star Wars movies when the text is rolling up the screen. Other than that, it's been a non issue.

I still can't get over HD. I was watching CNN in HD last night (I'm a U.S. politics buff) and I could actually see the reflection of the TV camera in the eyes of the anchor-woman (Campbell Brown I think is her name). Amazing what you can see when you have a 96" HD image!