Epson EH-LS9000 Review

Introduction

With so many of today’s projectors priding themselves on their portability, living room friendliness, convenient ultra short throw designs or extreme gaming support, it’s refreshing to be hanging out with a projector that’s designed first and foremost for the OG of projected entertainment, home cinema.

The relatively serious nature of Epson’s EH-LS9000 can be seen in everything from its colossal size by modern projector standards through to its extensive collection of set up and performance features, and an impressive suite of picture specifications that includes a healthy (for a dedicated home cinema projector) 2,200 lumens of brightness and a whopping claimed dynamic contrast of 2,500,000:1.

With the tough demands of HDR catching out so many projectors over the past couple of years, though, can Epson’s £2,999.99 LS9000 get the balance right?

Design

• Huge footprint
• Two HDMI ports
• Quiet cooling system

If how serious a home cinema projector is directly related to its physical size, the Epson EH-LS9000 must be a very serious projector indeed. It’s a beast of a thing, sitting a chunky 193mm high on a 520 by 427mm footprint that has no business being anywhere near your average coffee table. This is a projector designed for permanent installation on a dedicated stand or ceiling mount in a room specifically given over to home cinema use.

That’s not to say you absolutely couldn’t use the EH-LS9000 in a regular living room – especially the matt, textured-finish white version (signified by a W at the end of its name) I tested. But as well as likely leaving you no table space for the all-important chips, dips and popcorn, honestly I’d also say that the projector’s enormity is a pretty unsubtle hint this is a projector that really deserves to be treated with the respect of a proper cinema-like environment.

The centrally mounted lens on the front edge is large enough to promise good clarity and detail to support the LS9000’s claimed 4K resolution output, and the bodywork’s rounded off edges stop it becoming a harsh presence in your home cinema room.

Connections are recessed under a ledge on the projector’s rear, and comprise two HDMI inputs, two powered USB-A ports, a 12V trigger port, an RS-232C control port, and an Ethernet jack for service use.

One last point worth raising about the EH-LS9000’s design is the advanced ventilation system that’s able to keep fan noise down to a generally not distracting 30dB even in the laser lighting’s brightest setting. This drops to just 22dB Eco using the projector’s Eco light output, too.

User Experience

• Large backlit remote control
• Control 4 Certified, Crestron Integrated partner, AMX Device Discovery
• On-projector control buttons

The most simple and direct way of controlling the Epson EH-LS9000 is via a combination of its onscreen menus and unusually large remote control. Both of these items are pretty complex to use by typical projector standards, thanks to the menus containing way more adjustments and options than usual, and the remote filling its large surface with way more buttons than usual. Some of the buttons feature writing so small you need a magnifying glass to read it, too.

The remote control is backlit, and the menus are divided into a welcome set of sub-menus – even if it’s not always crystal clear exactly which options you might expect to find in a particular sub-menu until you’ve explored it.

You’ll learn your way around both the remote and menus in time, though – plus, once you’ve first set the projector up and experimented with its long list of settings you’ll usually only need to trouble yourself on a day-to-day basis with a handful of options. And the projector helpfully puts the most frequently used options in a separate menu placed right at the top of the others.

As I’d hope with a projector pitched at the dedicated home theatre market, the LS9000 can be integrated into wider home control systems. In particular, it’s a Crestron Integrated partner, Control 4 Certified, and compatible with AMX Device Discovery.

Dedicated theatre projectors often find themselves installed in relatively hard to access places – especially mounted on ceilings. This hasn’t stopped Epson putting a collection of menu navigation buttons on the rear of the projector’s bodywork, should you somehow have managed to lose the epic remote down the back of the sofa.

Features

• HDR10+ support
• Claimed 4K resolution
• Laser-lit LCD lighting system

The Epson EH-LS9000 has enough set up options and promising specifications to satisfy even very demanding home theatre fans – as well as meeting the requirements of a fairly substantial professional calibration if you want to take things that far.

Its laser-lit three-LCD optical system promises a long operational life (20,000 hours is quoted), while peak brightness is claimed to be 2200 lumens. There are certainly projectors out there that can go significantly brighter, including some much cheaper models.

Experience suggests that when it comes to the specific requirements of a dedicated (and so presumably well blacked out) home theatre room, relatively moderate peak brightness levels like those of the EH-LS9000 can produce a better all-round picture that reflects the importance of contrast and black levels to a rounded home cinema image. Especially with HDR pictures.

The LS9000 claims a respectable native contrast of 1800:1, which balloons to a huge 2,500,000:1 with the projector’s various light-adaptive measures in place.

The claimed 4K resolution is achieved using a pixel shifting system, rather than being truly native in the way Sony’s SXRD 4K projectors and some of JVC’s most recent 4K D-ILA projectors are.

This will prove helpful for anyone trying to push the projector’s image size anywhere close to its claimed 300-inch maximum – though personally given the brightness the projector’s capable of, I actually wouldn’t advise pushing the EH- LS9000 past the 200 or even 150-inches if you want to enjoy punchy, dynamic pictures.

The menus provide five distinct picture presets (called Color Modes by Epson), including Bright and regular Cinema options, self-explanatory Vivid and Dynamic modes, and a less obvious Natural mode which actually turns out to be more interesting than it sounds.

Tweaks available for each picture preset take in everything from 10% increments in the lasers’ light output to 0-100 settings for brightness, contrast, color saturation and sharpness; full white balance calibration; multiple dynamic contrast settings for adjusting how much the projector pushes the image’s dark and, especially, bright extremes; a full RGBCMY colour management system; and an Image Enhancement suite of video processing options that includes an adjustable auto-contrast setting, regular and MPEG noise reduction, and a Super Resolution system for making images look sharper.

Frame interpolation is provided for tackling judder with 24p sources that can be operated at High, Normal, and Low levels of strength, or turned fully off. Finally among the really interesting stuff, there’s a selectable-strength scene adaptive gamma system that feels like Epson’s take on the dynamic tone mapping systems many HDR displays use to try and optimise HDR images to their screens’ capabilities.

As usual with dedicated home theatre projectors, the EH-LS9000 doesn’t carry any of the increasingly advanced auto set up and image calibration features that more and more ‘casual’ living room projectors provide.

It does, though carry motorised zoom, focus and image shift (across a vertical range of +/-96.3% and a horizontal range of +/- 24%) control, so you can fine tune these factors from the comfort of your sofa. This is particularly helpful if you’ve got the projector mounted on your ceiling.

There are also 10 lens memory positions for storing different settings for different aspect ratios/sources, and its high dynamic range format support extends to HDR10+, with its extra scene by scene image data, as well as the basic HDR10 and HLG formats. There’s no support for Dolby Vision, though.

I was pleased to find that despite its movie focus, the LS9000’s HDMI ports support 4K/120Hz gaming feeds, and there’s a Fast processing option that reduces input lag to a respectable 38.5ms with 60Hz games, and just under 20ms with 120Hz titles.

While the LS9000 goes big on picture calibration features, as with most dedicated home cinema projectors it doesn’t carry a built-in smart system. So if you want to stream content into it, you’ll have to add your own external streaming device. Also in keeping with most dedicated home cinema projectors, the LS9000 doesn’t carry any built in speakers as Epson assumes buyers of projectors like this will be using a separate surround sound system.

Picture Quality

• Impressive sharpness and depth
• Vibrant colours in some modes
• Strong HDR effect

The LS9000 isn’t just Epson’s best projector in ages – it’s also up there with the best of what’s been a year packed with projection heroes. It’s one of those projectors that gets so much right that it’s hard to break pictures down into their constituent elements to try and get to the bottom of just what’s working so well.

The first thing that struck me, was how exceptionally sharp and detailed its pictures look. This came as a bit of a surprise given that as with most projector brands the LS9000’s 4K support is actually achieved by a pixel shifting arrangement rather than the projector’s three LCD optical chips (one each for the red, green and blue colour elements) each carrying native 4K pixel counts.

Good quality 4K Blu-ray discs and, to a lesser extent, 4K streams from an Apple TV box, all looked outstandingly crisp, textured and dense.

This excellent sharpness is achieved without any classic over sharpening side effects such as edge haloing or exaggerated grain, and there’s an intelligence and naturalism to it that gives films a strikingly three-dimensional feel without, again, the results looking forced or artificial.

Also striking is how much of an HDR effect the EH-LS9000 manages to get out its 2,200 lumens of claimed maximum brightness. During the shots in the Time Variance Authority monitoring room in the 4K Blu-ray of Deadpool & Wolverine, there’s a level of intensity to the room’s monitors and the way the lights catch the leather bits of Deadpool’s outfit and the ends of his swords that’s rare to see in the sub-£3,000 projector world.

Even projectors that claim significantly more on-paper brightness rarely manage to deliver the sort of HDR highlights that the LS9000 does – a result of Epson’s projector also managing to produce more contrast than most of today’s ultra-bright projectors. In other words, dark parts of typical mixed-content images enjoy a convincingly dark, natural black colour even at the same time that the picture is boldly delivering its intense highlights.

There’s no TV-like local dimming system in play here; no living room projector has cracked that most difficult projection nut yet. Epson’s light management with this projector is outstandingly good, across all of its many and varied picture presets. Even the Cinema mode, which delivers the least bright pictures of all available presets, still delivers enough of a sense of contrast to keep the HDR feeling going.

It’s not just the range and impressive management of its available laser light that helps the LS9000’s pictures look so eye-catchingly dynamic, either. In all of its presets bar the Cinema one, which limits brightness output to around 60% of the maximum possible, pictures retain an impressive level of baseline brightness. Much more than the 2200 Lumens claimed would lead you to expect.

Contributing to the image’s excellent sharpness and sense of detail is seemingly pretty much infinite subtlety when it comes to expressing tiny colour tone shifts and gradients. There’s no room for blocking, banding, or that cartoonish quality that can afflict skin tones, background walls, skies and so on with displays that skimp on colour finesse.

The very brightest highlights of the LS9000’s pictures retain good levels of detail and shading, rather than clipping such minutiae out. Even the Dynamic preset manages to ‘map’ HDR’s expanded tonal range to the projector’s capabilities without leaving anything feeling either dull or ‘hollowed out’.

The LS9000’s colours can look a bit washed out in some of its picture presets, it has to be said. The Natural and Bright Cinema presets are the worst offenders, though arguably the only preset that really serves up the sort of colour saturations the projector’s HDR-friendly light controls feel like they deserve to be partnered with is the Vivid one. Calman Ultimate measurements confirm that this mode can cover a very impressive 89.71% of the HDR P3 colour spectrum.

This mode’s punchiness also has the advantage of hiding more effectively than any of the others the one area of the picture where the LS9000 can struggle: Black colours during very dark scenes. Where a shot or scene is predominantly dark, it can appear infused with slightly more low contrast greyness than I’d ideally like to see. Especially in the Dynamic, Bright Cinema and Natural modes.

The LS9000’s dynamic contrast and scene adaptive gamma options both go about their business very efficiently, though, contributing to more dynamic looking pictures without their constant adjustments causing the picture to look unstable or inconsistent, even during complex dark shots.

An impressive amount of shadow detail is visible at all times during even the darkest scenes, too, and in the Vivid mode, at least, the LS9000 retains richer colour saturations in dark shots than most projectors do. The LS9000 also responds more effectively to the extra picture information in HDR10+ sources than many displays do.

The Cinema mode’s relatively dark take on things does, though, seem designed more to achieve the best balance between the projector’s light and dark extremes than to necessarily deliver the most accurate pictures. Tests using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 spectrometer confirm this, with the Natural Colour Mode/picture preset actually delivering the most all-round accurate pictures based on the film world’s SDR and HDR mastering standards.

While Natural may therefore become the default mode of choice for the more purist side of the home cinema market, the intensity delivered by the Vivid mode’s extra colour vibrancy and dynamic take on HDR delivers the most consistently enjoyable, punchy, intense, immersive, contrast-rich and engaging results.

Occasionally a skin tone in this mode can look a touch overcooked, but for the most part I was hugely impressed by the degree of balance the LS9000’s Vivid mode can achieve, with no tone looking excessive or out of kilter. All while simultaneously delivering, say, the reds and yellows of Deadpool and Wolverine’s respective suits in Deadpool & Wolverine with more conviction and what actually feels like more accuracy. Certainly when it comes to matching the look I remember the film having in cinemas. It’s typically a joy to watch, it truly is.

I would recommend a few general tweaks to most of the presets, including the Vivid one, to get the best out of them. Turning off all noise reduction with decent quality 4K and, actually, most HD sources is generally a good idea, and I ended up turning off the Frame Interpolation system too. The High and Medium Frame Interpolation settings both leave 24p films looking too smooth and soap opera-like, and while the Low mode does take the edge off 24p judder, it can cause a slight stuttering effect that’s especially noticeable during slow camera pans. So as the judder with no frame interpolation active really isn’t bad, I preferred to leave it off.

While I might quibble with some of the set up choices Epson has made for its colour mode presets, though, the Vivid and Natural modes, at least, are both pretty easy to make either extremely watchable or impressively accurate respectively.

And now that we’re back in the positive frame of mind the LS9000 deserves, I should add that it delivers one of the punchiest and most stable gaming images I’ve seen from such a home cinema-focused projector, while its three-LCD optical system means it naturally avoids all traces of the pure red, green and blue striping noise (known as the rainbow effect) that’s commonly an issue with rival DLP projection technology.

Should you buy it?

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