Very nice but missing some aspect features.
The HC1500 is a very nice projector especially for the price. I upgraded from an InFocus Screenplay DLP Front Projector - SP4805. By comparison the HC1500 is much brighter quieter and more crisp. It also fit my existing ceiling mount which was very convenient.
The only problem I've not found a fix for is the aspect ratio selection. The SP4805 was native 16:9 but also had a mode for 4:3 and another which cropped a 4:3 picture to 16:9 and enlarged it to fill the whole screen. This mode was really nice for TV broadcasts and old DVDs filmed in 16:9 but broadcast in 4:3 with black bars. Without that zoomed/cropped mode you have to watch it in 4:3 mode so you see the black bars both on the sides of the screen and then again on the top and bottom. This means you're basically looking at an image 2/3 the size of your screen.
As far as I can tell the HC1500 does not have an aspect mode that works well with this problem. It is also native 16:9 and has the following aspect modes; auto (which as far as I can tell is identical to 16:9 regardless of input signal) 4:3 4:3 stretched to 16:9 (with serious distortion on the left and right sides) and two zooms. The user's guide says the two zooms are optimized for cinemascope and vista images with subtitles but they don't expand the projected area out to take advantage of the better screen/picture aspect ratio match. Instead it simply crops the image within the 4:3 display boundary and leaves the black bars on the sides. This is very annoying when watching 16:9 TV show (broadcast non-HD) because your picture is miniaturized and surrounded by unused black bar screen area. The show is being broadcast specifically to fill your whole screen but the projector leaves bars on all 4 sides of the image.
I don't understand why Mitsubishi omitted that feature it seems requisite these days. The fine print in the user's guide does mention that zoom modes will make the image of a 480i signal smaller. Again it looks fine when you have 480p input which I only get from my DVD player or a native 4:3 TV 480i input (normal TV). And the picture is fantastic with both.
Overall I'm happy with this machine especially for the price and bright HD picture. But if anyone has a work around for the aspect issue I'd love to hear it.More detail ...
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