Step this way, it's movie time
With the Epson EH-TW3600 home theatre, you don't even need to dim the room lights
With the Epson EH-TW3600, you can turn your large living room into a 300-inch theatre without any problem.
The TW3600 is not large and quite portable and is easy to set up, so you won’t need to call on an experienced technician to help with the installation. And it really did project high-quality, high-definition videos to a screen or a wall during the test.
During the test in my living room, the TW3600 projected a nearly 80-inch video screen from about the two-metre distance between the wall and the projector.
In zoom-wide mode, it can project 100-inch video from about 2.98 metres. It projects 300-inch video at 19.15 metres in the zoom-tele mode.
The TW3600 produced very bright pictures. I was able to screen a HD movie during the daytime in my living room by projecting on the 60-inch white screen that provided for the test. But I have to admit that I enjoyed watching HD movies in larger format by projecting the picture on my cream-coloured wall at night.
Although the wall is not exactly white and in need of a coat of paint, the brightness and high contrast of the TW3600 made watching the movie very enjoyable during the test.
The light from the projector was so bright that I could watch even with the ceiling light on. Of course, when the room was dark, the picture quality was much better.
The TW3600 uses D7 0.74-inch wide panel with Micro Lens Array technology and C2Fine (Crystal Clear Fine) technology in 12-bit colours to reproduce sharp and colourful pictures.
The D7 panel is made of high-temperature polysilicon TFT liquid crystal (HTPS), which uses 3LCD technology to ensure faithful colour reproduction.
It has 1080p native resolution, which allows it to project very sharp and beautiful Full HD 1080p video. All in all, it displays two million pixels for each of the three LCD panels.
The TW3600 can achieve very bright light because it has white light output of 2,000 lumens and colour light output of 2,000 lumens. The high white light output and colour light allow you to enjoy bright and colourful images on large screens even with substantial ambient lighting. So, the projector is perfect to use in a room with a lot of ambient lights.
The projector also has very high contrast ratio of 50,000:1, which allows it to produce fine details of movies.
TW3600 has several signal input ports – two HDMI ports, a video component input, S-Video input, a composite RCA video input, and a D-sub 15-pin (RGB) input for connecting to a notebook computer or a VGA card of a desktop computer.
Normally, a home theatre project should be installed by experienced technicians to make most of the picture quality and should be used with high-quality cinematic screen.
But I could easily set it up, placing it on a card box on top of a table. The TW3600 comes with lens shift function vertically and horizontally for adjusting the projected picture on the screen to maximum advantage. I used the lens shift function to raise the picture on the wall so didn’t need to hang the projector from the ceiling. And with a minor adjustment of the lens’ zoom ring, the projector managed to project sharp and clean movies on my wall in a snap.
The quality of projected movies depends on the source of the movies as well.
I played Full HD movies from my ViVo Legacy hard disk player through the TW3600 and the picture quality was really pleasing. For example, I watched “Planet 51” in Blu-ray backup file, and I was impressed in the sharp and clean picture and very saturated colours. The picture was so sharp that I could see the green iris in the eyes of the alien hero!
And I borrowed a TrueVision HD receiver from a friend to test the quality of the projector. I connected the projector to the HD receiver using Merrex Kable HDMI-1 flex flat cable. It was found that the quality from standard definition channels, like the free TV channels 3, 5, 7 and 9 was okay. The picture quality from certain TrueVision channels looked better, especially from AXN and AXN Beyond.
Best of all, the picture quality from HBO HD channel, which is broadcast at 1080i resolution, looked impressively sharp and colourful. We enjoyed watching the channel for hours during the test.
When I selected the dynamic colour mode of the TW3600, I think the picture quality was on par or better than my old 42-inch LCD TV when we watched the HBO HD channel. All in all, the TW3600 has five colour modes for you to select to suit your taste. The modes include Living Room and Cinema. Using the Cinema mode to watch the TW3600 in a dark room, you will get theatre experience. The Living Room mode is a step-lower bright than the dynamic colour mode.
Of course, the picture quality from Full HD movies of the Blu-ray full-backup format looked better.
Although the quality from standard definition channels just looked okay, you can have a technician further enhance the picture quality by using professional adjustment tools.
Among other things, it provides a Six-Axis Colour Adjustment tool to allow you to adjust the hue and saturation for each of the RGBCMY colour components independently. This feature enables you to make more precise colour adjustments, allowing you to customise images to suit your own colour preferences.
And the TW3600’s fan was not noisy. In fact. during the test, we did not notice the noise from the fan at all.
Epson EH-TW3600 has a suggested retail price of Bt99,000.
Key specs
_ LCD size: 0.74-inch wide panel
with MLA (D7, C2Fine, 12Bit)
_ Driving method: Poly-silicon
TFT active matrix
_ Pixels: 2,073,600 dots
(1920x1080) x 3
_ Native resolution: 1080p
_ Aspect ratio: 16:9
_ Projection lens: F-number:
2-3.17; Focal length:
22.5-47.2mm; Zoom ratio:
Optical zoom x 2.1
_ Lamp type: 200W
_ Lamp life normal mode:
4,000 hours
_ Brightness: White light, colour
light output both 2,000 lumens
_ Contrast ratio: 50,000:1
_ Dimensions
(include lens and feet):
360x450x136mm
_Weight: 7.3kg
