Official TW4000 Owners Thread!

The title is half in jest, as I don't expect to see to many other people in Japan purchasing EH-TW4000 projector and frequenting the (English language) AVS Forums, but I thought I'd post my thoughts on my new TW4000, as it showed up today!



First off, anyone who's reading a lot in this forum over the last few months probably already knows that I'm a gamer, first and foremost. I have my HD DVD collection (both an A2 and Xbox 360) and the RD-X7, but the bulk of my game hours come from gaming, and I wouldn't even know how to get a projector professionally calibrated in this country. (I do own DVE on HD DVD, but I also know what my eyes like)

After some image lag tests, Transformers on HD DVD and some gaming, here's my quick first impressions:

Pros:
Sharp. Great blacks. Fantastic picture out of the box. (It's defaults are set to low lamp, which is great for my size screen, and Cinema 1, which looks great.) Going from a Z3 to a TW4000, it's way too big of an improvement for me to get into any nitty gritty stuff. Everything is fantastic so far. (The convergence and uniformity are also really good based on what I've seen so far, but I'll check them out closer tonight.)
Very quiet. (Again, at the default low lamp setting, I haven't tried "high")
English remote (No Japanese on it at all...unlike the menus)
Very pretty. I wasn't a fan of the 1080UB/TW2000 design, while I did like the AE2000's look...seeing the TW3000 in white, I wasn't sure how much I'd like the look of the TW4000, but it looks very sleek.

Cons:
Frame creation is enabled by default, even on the VGA input. (I agree it looks very unnatural at times, even on low, and it also causes input lag) After Transformers was over, the judder on the credits was obvious, so I tried the frame creation. High and normal made them look extremely fluid...it's a shame that it also tries to "frame create" moving stubble with horrible results on moving closeups and adds a tangible amount of audio lag.
The settings are only Japanese, you can't set them to English. (As is Panasonic, but my Sanyo Z3 allowed me to set the menus to English.)
Big. (Okay, not really a con as I have space for it, but it's so much bigger than my Z3. Even though I've seen the TW3000 a half dozen times store settings, and measured to make sure it would fit, just how big this projector is was mildly surprising when I set it up in the same place the TW4000 used to be.

Honestly, after seeing JVC's HD750 on display at CEATEC, I was stoked about what a new projector would do to my room, but after seeing the TW3000 on display a few times, I was somewhat concerned with how good the TW4000 would look. (The HD750 was in a pure black room with black velvet and black leather seats...the TW3000 was on display at a BicCamera that would be more similar to the issues I'd have in my room with it's off white walls.) I was impressed with the AE2000, but unimpressed with the recent organic panel 1080p projectors...and this projector is definitely a signficant step up from the AE2000.

I'm not about to say anything crazy about this being in the same league as the HD750, but for my less than ideal setup, I can't imagine a projector doing a noticably better job...and I'm expecting the projector to last longer on it's shelf than the 5-year extended warranty I got for it.

Anyway, those are some quick thoughts before I head out to dinner with my wife, and come back for some gaming later, but I thought I'd ask if anyone else in Japan is getting a TW4000, and see if any of you (who might be interested in the 6500) have any more specific questions I might be able to reply to.

In depth impressions?

Great uniformity using various test screens. Some of the DVE test videos definitely need a warning before viewing them on a full sized projector screen. (Somewhat trippy...probably headache inducing.)

The convergence is a huge step up over my Z3, which definitely had visible convergence up close. I am using quite a bit of horizontal lens shift, and that is causing me an expected about of CA. While I didn't notice the CA until analyzing test screens up close, it does exist. Neither the CA, convergence (which is quite good) nor uniformity are anything that I'm remotely concerned about based on it's performance in movies, games and test screens so far.

There is also the faintest curved line of slightly increased brightness, slightly left of center, which seems to be the result of the large amount of lens shift I'm using. I had to really really analyze a gray screen up close to find it. It stays there regardless of lens shift, and would be outside of the viewable area if perfectly centered, but it is there for me. I don't really see it (even looking for it) on my couch, but standing and adjusting the projector, I can make it out. While I'm not explaining it well, it's like if part the rim of a glass were caught just right and reflected ever so faintly in the screen.

I know projector results can be quite hit and miss from box to box, with both the AE3000 and 1080UBs showing slightly more than one in four people on AVS having issues out of the box, but it looks like I got a good one. Looking for problems, I only found the above, and that's pretty good in my book. If this is indicative of the QC for these models, I expect a lot of happy faces in the 6500 thread.

Aside from DVE and Transformers, the day has been Xbox 360 day, which has been very enjoyable. A huge step up, dark games like COD:WAW are remarkably more playable.

Editing any of the presets that used the lamp in high mode or setting the lamp to high mode did not give me colors that I liked. I fooled around a small amount with the various settings, but basically stuck to Cinema Black 1 for Transformers (movies) and Cinema Black 1 with a 2.0 gamma for Xbox gaming. (Specifically because of how hard it used to be to see people in shadows with my old projector)

This is more of a ramble than a detailed review, but if anyone has any specific questions, that might help me give more a more meaningful response.

No, I'm not using the iris, actually. By default, the "Auto Iris" is turned off. I sit right next to the projector, and it is very quiet. I tried turning the iris on while gaming (not because I thought it would help, but I wanted to hear the noise level). It's not super noisy, but it is audible. (I set it straight to the "fast" setting, which might be louder than the "normal". While I don't really have any interest in using the iris for gaming, I may give it a try the next time that I watch a movie, but part of me wonders if it was set to off by default for a reason.

I turned off pretty much option for my gaming setting, and I thought it was great for gaming through HDMI. That said, I don't have any PCs that I can use to test it over HDMI, I could only test it through VGA, and there very, very few options available to turn on/off through VGA.

I haven't watched standard broadcast TV, but my RD-X7 PVR has the same Reon-VX chip, and it does a fantastic job with DVDs, even over my old projector, so assuming that the Reon chip is what was giving me the great upscaling and IQ, I think the TW4000 should handle SD-DVD very nicely.
Basically, it was the bizarre stubble in 24p content that just looked wrong to me. I think it would be fantastic for sports and CGI, no doubt. I'm not sure how it would look for animation or normal TV, but my guess is that it would probably be very helpful.

24fps just isn't enough information to start making intermediary frames without creating some noticably artificial frames for some material. Film does have a "feel" to it, which the TW4000 does fantastically, but that's not the reason I turned it off.

Strangely, the 1080UB at Yodobashi Camera had a dead bulb from September, and was never replaced. I can say the sharpness on the TW4000 is very, very satisfying to me.

I did take some screenshots with my digital camera. All of the photos are unedited JPEGs straight out of the camera. I cannot set my custom white balance to 6500, so some are at 6300 and some are at 6700. If you click on the photo, you can go to the flickr page where the EXIF data is available.

As for the movies, I just took a few photos from V for Vendetta and Batman Begins. My wife was not pleased to see me ducking into the projector room rather than keeping her company while she made gyoza, so there are only 6 photos. (I fiddled with the exposure in the manual settings for each shot and did change the aforementioned white balance. I also tweaked the focus a bit on Batman, as it wasn't in perfect focus. (It probably still wasn't in perfect focus afterwards, but it was sharp enough to look great from my normal viewing distance.)

The settings for the photos are the default "Cinema Black 1" (low lamp mode) with frame creation turned off and auto iris turned on. I tried to get a good balance between capturing the image the way it looked while avoiding blown highlight and/or under/over exposed blacks. The particular exposure chosen for each is an arbitrary personal preference, but rather than try to choose the exposure that was most complementary to the TW4000, I tried to choose the exposure that was most accurate to what I saw.

The black and white WB logo from Batman Begins is slightly overexposed, the grey used portion of my screen can be seen. My screen is the width of a 100" 16x9 diagonal, but the height of a 80" 16x9 diagonal, which allows me room width 2.35:1 movies and 80" 16x9 gaming and television. (A personal preference, giving me a 2.2:1 screen, which is somewhere between CIH and CIA)

The one pic which did not look good regardless of exposure was the skintones on the Christain Bale close up from Batman Begins. I didn't bother trying to fiddle with the camera, as the exposure looked good even if the skin didn't.

V for Vendetta:



Batman Begins:





Final note, my wife was cooking in the kitchen with the TV on, both affecting the quality of light in the room. The sliding tatami room doors block most, but not all of the light. I don't think it made a big difference, but it might be possible to get slightly better pictures under better settings, but I don't think I'll bother.

P.S. In addition to the EXIF data, the 10MP full sized images are also available, should anyone be interested.

Thanks very much for the kind words. It's definitely nice to hear that the time I put into getting those pics up was actually useful for someone here.

As for the TW4000...bizarre things happened today. First, and almost certainly unrelated, a very reliable Linux box in the house that's been around for ages bit the dust this morning. It was shut down working, and then said it couldn't find a valid boot partition this morning.

Then, this evening, I was playing some Call of Duty: World at War when the projector suddenly turned off. No temperature light or anything else. I waited a while and turned it back on. (My Xbox 360 had been on the whole time) When I turned it back on, it made the Xbox reboot. (HDMI issue?)

I figure it's a fluke, so I play again, but it happens within 30 minutes.

I try to figure out what's different, and remember that I had turned auto iris on for the screen shots above. Maybe, I reason, maybe the extra energy being used by the TW4000 means the Xbox 360, receiver, DVR and TW4000 are pulling too much power from that one power strip. So I unplug the TW4000 from the power strip, and plug it directly into the open outlet directly into the wall.

So I play again, but it happens in 20-30 minutes.

I get the manual out to see if there's anything I missed. There's mention of the sleep timer under troubleshooting, so I boot the projector back up, figuring that I'm going to exchange it at Yodobashi anyway if there's any sign of a perminent issue.

Again, when I turn the projector back on, it makes my Xbox 360 reboot. I turn off sleep mode, and try to play Call of Duty again, ruling out the possible causes through process of elimination.

It happens again. Except it's definitely faster this time.

So I decide to try again, with the now standard rebooting of the Xbox, but play Catan, a board game that's not going to use nearly as much processing power nor as much action as COD.

It happens again. I realize it doesn't even seem to be doing the 16 second cool down that the manual talks about. Hm...bad maybe?

I want to turn it back on right away to see if there's any kind of temperture light or other warning signal. While it does make the Xbox reboot, it also is completely unresponsive and looks like this:



There's three more photos in my photostream if you click on that image. It was constantly changing lines of static, and turned greenish at the same time as the Xbox noise sounded, meaning there would normally have been a lot of green at that point.

So yeah, projector goes crazy.

Now, at this point, I figure I've turned this thing on more times in the last 12 hours than I normally do in a week, and even if it does work, I'm likely returning it, so I turn it off, and hook the Xbox up through VGA.

Works perfect, 1920x1080. Play through a whole two games of Catan to make sure it's working. It is.

Hm. Well, this is how I connected the Xbox with the VGA cable and HDMI cable. I was hopefully I could switch between the two, but when the HDMI cable is plugged in, the VGA out is turned off, but the 5.1 optical out still works. I looked, but I couldn't find any reports of anyone else having this kind of issue. How is my TW4000 able to make my Xbox 360 reboot?

(The Xbox, VGA cable, 2m HDMI 1.3a [can't find 1.3b in Bic or Yodobashi here] cable and TW4000 were all bought in the last week)

Anyway, needless to say it sounds like I need to make sure I get the official Microsoft HDMI cable to plug in my optical stereo cable to use HDMI.

Is there some other possible issue here? Has the projector possibly suffered any damage from this? (Aside from undue wear and tear on the bulb) What is up with that crazy static? Why did the first 8 hours of gaming have no problems? I saw HDCP handshake issues while watching Transformers, but I thought that was part of a known issue between Transformers and the Xbox 360 HD DVD player... I have more questions than answers, but I'm hoping that's where you guys can come in help me out.

I could definitely change up HDMI cable and/or try to use my PVR or HD-DVD player on that input, but I'm wondering why it would suddenly happen after a day of working just fine...

As for temperature, I'm quite confident it shouldn't be a temperature warning. It was about 10C yesterday (50F), and I was wearing microfleece pajamas and a thick blanket over me. (We weren't using the heater yet) It doesn't make it impossible that it could be temperature related, but even if some internal fan wasn't working from day one, I'd be surprised, because it worked just fine for over an hour on VGA right after it shut down on HDMI.

2m, so just 6ft. Strange, huh?

I think I'm going to try to go to Yodobashi today and pick up an official Xbox 360 HDMI cable, and see if that could possibly fix it. At the very least I'd like to rule out as many causes of the problem as possible before exchanging it.

Of the top of my head, I think the TW4000 settings are off, low, normal and high...but if that's the case, I would say there are four settings, or three settings and off, depending on how you wanted to count. Maybe that's what they mean? I can reconfirm later.
I believe the TW4000 shows each frame four times for 24, 25 and 30fps material (96, 100 120Hz respectively).

Edit: Looking at the manual, it looks like 4:4 pull down is on by default for 24 fps material, but when I was watching 30 fps material, it was off, and when I turned it on, it looked unnatural. The instructions say that if this happens to turn it off for non-1080p/24Hz material if unnatural movement occurs. The Japanese manual seems to differ from the US manual here, so I'm still not sure exactly what to tell you for 4:4 pull down

Still having HDMI problems with the Xbox 360 and TW4000. I bought the official Xbox HDMI cable set today, which includes a new AV plug for getting optical audio, as well as a new HDMI cable. First, I just tried the new AV cable, on the off chance the old one was causing problems. No dice, the problem (projector suddenly and unexpectedly turning off) happened again. This time, however, we were watching a movie rather than playing a game, and I recognized the Xbox noise when it happened. It's the same HDCP handshake error I got when I was watching Transformers.

So I turned it off, changed HDMI cables to the official Microsoft one, and still ended up with the same problem happening about 30 minutes later.

At this point I think I can pretty safely say it is not the cable nor the AV plug being used for optical audio out, as two separate wires for each didn't make any difference.

Feeling a bit dumbfounded at this point. Is it the projector or the Xbox 360? While I haven't extensively used anything else through HDMI, I've only had the problem with those two so far. (I'll try to use the RD-X7 some more on the same HDMI port, and see if I can't get the same thing to happen or not.)

Any help or similar experience?

It's the projector... At least it looks like it is. Plugged the RD-X7 into the HDMI 1 port (where the Xbox had been) and watched about a half hour of CSI:NY (actually, the first few minutes over and over and over) and it blacked out, right around 30 minutes in. That would be the third HDMI cable and the second device that it's happened with, so I think I know where to point the finger.

As for the other settings, there are scenes where frame creation makes TV look more real/vivid/3D (take your pick), but even 30fps CSI had some very unrealistic byproducts...things looking like they're moving too fast or too slow. (One thing that jumped out was a woman shaking two cans of spray paint, it was really wrong looking. I've got an HD ice hockey game recorded that I'll give it a try with, but I don't think I like it) Frame creation does have high, regular and low, and I definitely don't like regular, and probably won't be bothering with frame creation for anything but CG movies and possibly animation.

Auto iris on high does make a great difference in blacks, and is not nearly as audible as I'd earlier worried. Definitely something I'll have on for all my TV and movie presets.

Bottom line first weekend impressions: frame creation = unnatural and auto iris = thumbs up.

Sooo...now while using the Xbox 360 through VGA, it just conked out on me. With no sign of overheating or anything, just went completely black like it did with the HDMI. When I tried to turn it back on right away (because now I'm sure it's the projector and not a specific cable/source, and I'm planning to exchange it) it then blinked the temperature and warning lights for 10 seconds instead of turning on. Not sure what that means, but the manual says:
Bizarre...and not good.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm somewhat under the weather (the same thing my son and wife had has made it's way to me) so I won't be heading to work tomorrow, but I will bring this box back to Yodobashi Camera and try to get a new one tomorrow. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed as well!

Sadly, I filled out their optional online questionnaire before these problems occurred, but I'm thinking that the new projector has a new serial number, so I may fill out another questionnaire in hopes that they can get my experience, feedback and suggestions to the right people...

(P.S. The upside is that when it's working, this projector's picture is phenomenal. Assuming the replacement projector works all the time, my current and future posts will probably do more to promote Epson than attack it.)