Epson home theater 640 review: the home theater console you lack

Gene

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Advantages

Cheap. Bright enough to resist ambient light in a living room or family room. The three-chip LCD engine means it cannot display rainbow defects.

Disadvantages

800 x 600 resolution. No 3D support.

The Epson home theater 640 3LCD projector has low resolution and lacks 3D support, but it offers bright rainbow images for home entertainment at a low price.

The Epson home theater 640 3LCD projector ($359.99) is a great choice for home entertainment projectors, if you're on a tight budget, don't need 3D support, and don't mind having a resolution lower than typical. With a brightness rating of 3,200 lumens, it can take a picture that would dwarf any comparable HDTV, and it can be bright enough to accommodate ambient light in the family room. Even if you already have a high-quality home theater projector for watching movies, you may want 640 Best Priceat Amazon as a second projector that you can move between rooms or set up in your backyard to watch movies outdoors on summer nights.

The key reason for 640's low price is that its resolution is as low as 800×600. Like most TVS today, most home entertainment projectors -- including the Epson PowerLite home entertainment projector 730HD, which our editors selected for the budget price of the 2D home entertainment projector, and the Epson home theater 750HD, our budget 3D home's preferred -- entertainment model -- offer at least 720p (1,280×720) of original resolution. Most of these products, including benq TH670Best Price at Amazon, offer full hd (1,920 × 1,080) resolution.

Quite simply, 640's 800 x 600 resolution doesn't show the same level of detail as 720p, let alone 1080p. But it still offers a higher resolution than standard definition TV (SDTV), which everyone thought was acceptable before HDTV, and still has a non-hd channel resolution.

The basics and setup

At 3.1 x 11.6 x 9 inches (HWD) and 5 pounds, 5 ounces, 640 is small and light enough to easily move from room to room, or -- if you don't have a place to permanently set it -- store it when you're not using it.

The Settings are standard and have manual focus, but no optical zoom. A digital zoom allows you to resize the image without having to move the projector. However, it is best to avoid this situation, as digital zoom can introduce artifacts with certain images.

The image input is all on the back, with an HDMI port, a VGA port for PC or component video, and s-video and composite video ports. In addition, there is A USB type A connector for reading files directly from USB storage keys; USB Type B connector for connecting to PC for direct USB display. There is also A wi-fi icon near the USB Type A port, and it is recommended that you plug in A wi-fi dongle, but according to Epson, this is only because the 640 USES the same case as the other wi-fi-enabled models. 640 itself doesn't.

Brightness

Using the recommendations of the institute of motion picture and television engineers (SMPTE), for 208-282 inches of images (measured diagonally) under theater-to-dark lighting, the brightness is 3,200 lumens, assuming a screen gain of 1.0. For medium ambient light, the size drops to 138 inches.

One important thing to keep in mind is that these Numbers are the exact 4:3 measurements of the original aspect ratio of 640. When you watch a widescreen, 16:9 movie or TV show, the image will only cover part of the screen. 16:9 the appropriate size of the image is between 191 and 259 inches in dark lighting and 127 inches in medium ambient light. For darker rooms or smaller screen sizes, you can adjust the brightness of 640 by switching to Eco mode, selecting one of the lower-brightness preset modes, or both.

Picture quality

The level of detail in the 1080p input is quite sharp for the original resolution of 640, a step up from standard resolution of 480p, but a big step away from the 720p HD. Usually for models with this resolution, I also want to see the LCD screen door effect - each individual pixel outlined by a thin dark line. Surprisingly, however, I had to stand three feet away from the 78-inch-wide image I used for most of my tests to see the lines. They don't show a typical viewing distance of 10 feet or more at all.

Image quality is not only acceptable, although it hardly reaches the near excellent range. I saw some posters (details change suddenly, they should change gradually) and subtle detail loss (details based on shadows in dark areas), but only for the particularly harsh test clips.

Epson Projector

Also, in my theatre-dark lighting test, contrast was low enough, but not enough to be a problem with ambient light. What's more, the color quality in my tests was close to excellent, as was the color balance. This also helps the three-chip LCD design ensure that 640 does not display the rainbow artifacts that almost all DLP projectors do. Overall, the image quality is about what you would expect from a high-quality SDTV.

Audio and delay time

The 640 2-watt mono speakers provide good sound quality and enough volume to fill a small family room or living room. Unfortunately, there is no audio output port. For stereo sound, better sound quality or higher volume, you must bypass the projector completely.

For casual gamers, the lag time of Epson Home Theater 640 is good enough, to say the least. I measured it using the Leo Bodnar video signal input delay meter for 45 to 50 milliseconds (ms), depending on the preset color mode. This equates to between 2.7 and 3 frames per second at 60 frames per second, which is 33 millimeters or two frames slower than the fastest projector we tested. Serious gamers, however, tend to think that even a lag of 33 milliseconds is unacceptable.

Conclusion

For projectors that provide higher resolution images but are relatively inexpensive, consider using Epson 730HD, our preferred 720p 2D projector. Epson 750HD, 720p 3D model preferred budget selection; Or the DLP based BenQ TH670, which offers 1080p but occasionally has rainbow flaws. However, if your primary criterion is cost, then the Epson Home Theater 640 3LCD projector will provide you with large, bright, highly viewable images at an attractive low price.
 
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