The Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 3010e ($1,799 direct) offers a lot to get excited about. It's one of a very few sub-$2,000 projectors to claim full 1080p HD in 3D as well as 2D; it's the only one to offer WirelessHD as a connection choice; and it's one of two—the other being a variation on the same model—built around an LCD, rather than DLP, engine. This last distinction makes it and it's near twin the only low cost 3D projectors guaranteed at this writing to be free of rainbow artifacts.

The key difference between the 3010e and the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 3010 ($1,599 direct), is that only the 3010e supports WirelessHD. In addition, the 3010 comes with two pairs of 3D glasses, while the 3010e doesn't come with any. At $79 (street) per pair, that makes the real difference in price closer to $360 than $200. Both models are otherwise identical according to Epson. It's also worth mention that the only other direct competitors at the moment are the Optoma HD33 ($1,500 street, 4 stars) and the Acer H9500BD ($1,700, 3 stars) that I've recently reviewed.

Setup

Unlike many Epson home entertainment and home theater projectors, including the 2D Editors' Choice Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 8350 ($1299 direct, 4 stars), for example, the 3010e doesn't offer lens shift. That means you don't have much flexibility for positioning the projector vertically or horizontally relative to the screen. However, the 1.6x zoom gives you lots of flexibility in terms of how far you can place it from the screen for any given image size.

Setup is mostly standard fare, with two HDMI connectors, plus VGA and both component and composite video ports. However, if you use WirelessHD instead you can connect from up to a claimed 30 feet away without wires. I actually connected from about 32 feet in my tests. Simply connect the included WirelessHD transmitter to a video source by HDMI cable, set the projector to WirelessHD, and wait a moment for it to negotiate the connection.

If you have a large room, you may also want to add Epson's external emitter ($79 direct) to keep the 3D glasses in sync over the larger space. In my tests, however, they worked without problems with the built-in emitter.

Image Brightness and Audio

The 3010e's brightness rating is 2,200 lumens, which is a lot for a home theater projector. Even using Eco mode and the Cinema preset, which offers the lowest brightness, the projector is easily bright enough for a 140-inch diagonal 1.0 gain screen in theater dark lighting. It's also too bright for anything much less than 120 inches diagonally.

With this level of brightness, it can easily stand up to ambient light in a home entertainment context in a family room or living room. In full power mode and its brightest preset, it was bright enough in my tests for a 120-inch screen with moderate ambient light. And note that the 3010e offers built-in audio, which also helps makes it more of a home entertainment, rather than home theater, projector. The stereo 10-watt speakers offer enough volume to fill a family room, with the level of quality you'd expect from a good flat-panel HDTV.

2D Image Quality
Image quality in 2D is good to excellent. For our 2D tests, we use both DVDs upscaled to 1080p and Blu-ray discs. The only issues I saw were in particularly challenging scenes chosen precisely because they tend to cause problems. Even then, I saw only mild posterization (colors changing suddenly where they should change gradually) and minor loss of shadow detail (details based on shading in dark areas).

For the most part, the 3010e did well, with suitably vibrant color, good skin tones, and very little noise. The auto-iris also helps deliver reasonably dark blacks. And unlike many auto-iris features it works quickly enough so I didn't see any visible adjustment (aka yo-yo effect) when a movie cut to a scene with a different brightness level.

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One other minor issue worth mention is that I saw what looked like scaling artifacts at the claimed native resolution, using one of our standard suite of DisplayMate screens that makes scaling artifacts easy to see. This suggests that the native resolution isn't really 1080p and the projector may be both scaling the image and possibly applying anti-aliasing techniques in the process. If so, an HD image may not be quite as crisp as it would be with a true 1080p resolution. That said, I didn't see any obvious loss of detail our Blu-ray tests, so if there is any, it's subtle. As of this writing Epson has confirmed that it can reproduce the artifacts, but is still looking into the cause and whether it has any effect on video image quality.

Getting Over the Rainbow

The rainbow effect isn't an issue for LCD projectors like the 3010e, but it's worth mentioning here because it always a potential issue for single-chip DLP-based projectors like the directly competitive Optoma HD33 and Acer H9500BD. The problem crops up because of the way DLP projectors produce color, showing one primary color at a time. Light areas on screen can break up into little red-green-blue rainbows when you shift your gaze or an object moves. Some DLP projectors are more prone to showing these artifacts, and some people see them more easily than others.

The rainbow effect is a particular a concern for home theater and home entertainment projectors, both because the artifacts tend to show more often with video than with data, and because they can be far more annoying when they show repeatedly during a full-length move than, say, a short business presentation.

I see these artifacts easily, and saw them often enough with the Acer H9500BD to consider them a problem. I saw them far less often with the HD33. However, not seeing them at all with the 3010e makes for a much more pleasant viewing experience. Even if you don't see these artifacts easily, you might want to consider this as part of your buying decision if you expect to invite guests over to watch movies or sports.

3D Quality and Other Issues

As with both the HD33 and H9500BD, the 3010e offers full support for HDMI 1.4a 3D, so you can connect to a Blu-ray player, cable TV box, or equivalent source. It's also bright enough, even with 3D, to give you a reasonably large image that can stand up to the light in a typical family room or living room.

Image quality in 3D offers the same strengths as in 2D for the features that both modes share, including color quality, for example. However, it suffers from a moderate level of crosstalk.

Overall, between the Optoma HD33, Acer H9500BD, and 3010e, the most comfortable 3D experience was with the Optoma HD33, with the 3010e a close second for most content, but, unfortunately, not all. With one movie that isn't part of our standard tests—picked from HBO's current 3D offerings—watching 3D with the 3010e was less comfortable than watching with the H9500BD. (This particular movie wasn't playing on HBO when I tested the Optoma HD33.) The moral here is that comfort for 3D viewing varies with the content, but the 3010e holds its own in most cases. As with 2D content, it has the advantage over DLP projectors of not showing rainbows.

If the 3010e were a little more consistently comfortable to watch 3D with, it would be an easy pick for Editors' Choice. As it is, however, the crosstalk in 3D is a bit too strong an argument against it.

If you don't see or aren’t bothered by rainbow artifacts, you'll want to take a close look at the Optoma HD33 and Acer H9500BD also. Even if rainbows are an issue for you, you'll want to look at the HD33, which doesn't have much of a problem with them. However, the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 3010e is the brightest of these three projectors, which is particularly important if you want to use it in your living room rather than in theater dark lighting. More than that, if you want to avoid any possibility of seeing rainbow artifacts, it and its near twin, the 3010, are currently the only game in town in their price range for full HD 3D.

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