Pros: picture quality, bright, whisper quiet, design, connections, price.
Cons: menu system, remote, lamp price, warranty.
The bottom line: It is very bright, almost silent, and puts out an incredible picture with both HD and regular DVD. Hard not to like.
After a week with my first HC1500, I was convinced that it was impossible for so many people to love this projector, if the picture looked as bad as it looked on mine. That's why I decided to give it another chance and exchange it before I completely give up on it. I am really glad I did, because it turned out that it is indeed a great projector. Now I think it is only fair to completely re-write my review to reflect the performance of my new unit, since I do believe the first one was defective.


After 4 happy years with my Infocus X1, I've been progressively itching to upgrade to a true HD projector. When I saw the Mitsubishi HC1500 on sale at Best Buy for $799 I decided it was time.

This is a very popular projector at the moment, and generally getting rave reviews. Needless to say I had very high hopes for it. Let's see what we have here - a very nice looking (if it didn't look as good cosmetically it would've been gone on the next day) 720p projector, DLP technology, 1600 lumens, and 2500:1 contrast ratio.

The thing I was most worried about was the image offset - that's the position of the projected image in relation to the projector lense. A lot of people complain how large this offset is - supposedly the image is projected well above the lense, thus requiring either a very high ceiling or a low coffee table to fit a screen at a decent height. Well I was very happy to wonder what in the world were people talking about.

DON'T LET TALKS ABOUT THE OFFSET SCARE YOU AWAY FROM THE HC1500.

It was a pretty much direct swap with my X1. It is possible that the offset on the HC1500 was larger, but since it is a native 16:9 projector, the difference was probably eaten by the extra height of the 4:3 image of the X1. Bottom line - the offset of the Mitusbishi was absolutely no problem and my ceiling is really low.

The HC1500 is fairly well equipped with inputs, but there is only 1 HDMI. There are also 2 component - 1 from the R/B/G kind, and a nother one which doubles as a VGA input or a SCART input. There's also the usual composite and S-video, as well as a 12V trigger for an electric screen, an RS232 port for computer conrol, and a USB port. There is no monitor loop through nor any onboard audio, which is expected on a home theater projector.

It makes me feel like a cave man in this day and age, but I am still mostly watching standard definition TV from basic cable and a regular DVD recorder/player. My only HD source is my XBOX 360. This might be the reason why it might be too early for me to jump on the HD projector bandwagon.

As I already said, installation was fairly simple for me, since all I did was take the X1 down and put up the HC1500. I had to do very minor twists and turns and everything lined up great.

I was very surprise by the poor picture from my original unit, but after firing up the second one, all my fears and sceptisism were gone. This is a very bright projector, and puts out an incredible picture even with a decent amount of ambient light, something I really love, because I like having a little bit of light while watching TV.

I repeated all of my original tests I did with the first HC1500, and luckily the results this time were completely different. I'd have to say it was still a bit tricky to get the picture set up right, and I am still not sold on the menu system with its illogical organization, but at least at the end I was able to achieve an image with well balanced colors and good contrast.

I don't have a long enough HDMI cable yet, so for the time being I am mainly using component from my DVD player, but I moved my XBOX 360 close enough to check out the performance with HDMI as well. There is still a slight improvement in the image stability, but overall it was not as drastic as with the original projector. It is worth it though, so I will get the HDMI cable pretty soon. I tried several HD movie trailers from the XBOX marketplace, and they looked great, but now again with the improved DVD quality I don't see this much of an improvement to make me want to go and by a true HD player.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - to me a good DVD transfer looks fine enough to not make me want either of the new HD formats. Add to that the format war, relatively high prices of the media, the availability, and not least my need to be able to convert my movies to a media player format for portable viewing, and it looks like the HD formats will have to wait a lot longer.

I know I have completely switched my opinion about this projector, but with a properly working unit it does indeed feel like an enormous upgrade over my old and trusted X1.

The few things I still don't like are now very easy to live with it. Mostly I don't like the menus, they are simply not well organized and hard to navigate because the selected items are very lightly highlighted and difficult to see. I would have prefered separate color control menu instead of everything being burried under the color temperature menu. Tint and color saturation adjustments are not available on HDMI signals. At first it seems like there are a lot of options for tweaking, but there cold definitely be more. I am also not crazy about the remote. Although it is fully backlit, the lighting is very weak and the labels hard to see. The buttons are small and all the same shape and size, and there are separate power buttons for on and off, which I don't like, because I have to program separate buttons on my universal remote. As I said, all these are minor things that I have no problem with getting used to.

I hope I didn't miss anything in this rewrite. I love this projector now as much as I loved my X1 when I first bought it, but between the two there is no comparisson. Just a summary for others who may be making the same upgrade:

much brighter - makes everything more vivid and easier on the eyes.

almost completely silent - this was my one major complaint about the X1, the Mitsubishi is almost silent even if you're right next to it.

faster color wheel - on the first unit I saw a lot of rainbows, more than on the X1, but on the second one I haven't seen any. I suspect there might have been a problem with the color wheel of the first one.

Resolution - 720p makes the pixel structure less visible so the screen door effect is not as big as on the X1, but that never bothered me.

Inputs - HDMI and 2 component inputs. That was a problem with the X1 - it required adapters and didn't have HDMI at all.

Design - I think the HC1500 is one of the best looking projectors out there. I have to admit, that was one of the biggest reasons I went for it instead of the Optoma HD70.

The only aspect I still think the X1 beat the Mitsubishi is in the scaler - the X1's Faroudja is still superior to whatever is in the HC1500. With the HDMI connection though, the results were very close.

Well I am very happy to join the thousands of satisfied owners. I hope it lasts as long and trouble free as my X1 (it's still working, but lamp was getting very dim).