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Epson EH-TW3800 LCD Projector Review

Author John Archer
Published 18th May 2009
Manufacturer Epson
Supplier 1st Audio Visual
Price £1,645.00 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed £1,891.75 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price Click here
Design Score 7 for Design
Features Score 8 for Features
Image Quality Score 9 for Image Quality
Value Score 9 for Value
Overall Score 9 for Overall
Epson EH-TW3800 LCD Projector
award recommended

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Heading at last into the TW3800's expansive onscreen menus finds them nicely presented and organised. Even better, they're navigated via one of the best remote controls I've seen shipped with a projector. Its buttons are exceptionally clearly labelled, aggressively backlit, large enough to hit easily even in a dark projection room, and small enough in number to ensure there's plenty of space for them to sit in.

For many, probably the single most impressive features within the TW3800's onscreen menus will be its colour management options. These allow you to adjust the hue, saturation and brightness of all the six 'core' colours, as well as the offset and gain of the red, green and blue elements. What's more, in a really nice touch you can isolate the red, green and blue elements of the image onscreen, to give you a clearer idea of just what all your colour fine-tuning is actually achieving.


If all this talk of in-depth colour tuning has got you more scared than excited, fear not: the TW3800 also ships with a sensible and well-calibrated set of video presets - or 'Colour Modes', as Epson calls them. These include a Cinema Day option for people who have to suffer a little ambient light in their room; an HD option designed to match the 'official' HD colour standard; and my personal favourite, Silver Screen, which injects a touch more colour saturation into proceedings.

I should say that I still recommend tweaking the colours a little from the given presets, even if it's only with the help of a simple set up aid like the Digital Video Essentials HD Basics Blu-ray disc. I certainly had to tweak the saturations of the red, green and blue colour elements before I got things looking just as I wanted them. But the key thing is that the projector has enough flexibility to get things spot on, and that's what really matters.

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Really knowledgeable readers might be surprised to find names like Silver Screen and HD and Cinema Day among the TW3800's presets rather than the 'Theatre Black' options usually found on Epson projectors. But there's a very good reason for the name changes, namely that the TW3800 has been certified by the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF), requiring Epson to use the ISF's preferred preset names.

The other key ISF-related feature is the TW3800's carriage of an impressive set of extra preset memory slots, with such designations as ISFDayDVD and ISFNightVCR. These memory slots, accessible at the press of a single button, can be used by an ISF expert to provide optimised settings for every source you're likely to have, in separate day and night environments, with all the settings accessed quickly whenever you want them via a dedicated Memory button on the remote control.

 

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