Ok I hardly ever write reviews but I thought about this quite a bit and read a lot before making this purchase so I thought I'd do my best to help others. I was one of the earliest adopters of the whole home cinema projector idea. I inherited what was at the time a $5000 state of the art Epson machine in 1999. We bought it for our dot com start-up. Afterwards I took it home and bought a screen. I figured out how to connect it to my cable and surround sound and it has worked great for nearly 15 years. recently it just died I think it was the fan blades. So it was time to upgrade. I was all excited to find out I could replace it for as little as $400-$500 bucks. But then I found out there was a big divide between office powerpoint projectors and home cinema. When I originaly bought mine there was no difference. The guy at Office Depot told me that if I wanted it for movies that I'd be better off going to Best buy. I went to Best Buy and they only had like three choices in Home Cinema. I had rapidly figured out that in order to get true HD i.e.. 1080 P the cost was like $1500 on up ugh! I didn't want to spend that much. So I went on a crusade to find a 1080 P HD projector for under $1000 so I naturally went to Amazon. I read all kinds of reviews and went to sites like http://www.projectorcentral.com which was very helpful. I finally narrowed it down to four all found on Amazon and studied at Projector Central:
Optoma HD25 $949
BenQ W1070 $884
Mitsubishi HC 4000 $949
Acer H6510BD $740
These were all very highly rated. I was really tempted to get the Acer for the price but the machine did not seem to be compatible with as many formats as the others. I was really torn and couldn't decide. Then I read about the brand new machine from Epson the 2030 with full HD 1080 P and it was and LCD not DLP like all the others and most people I spoke with seem to think LCD is superior. It even is 3D capable and even though I don't watch 3D movies yet I figured it couldn't hurt to have the latest technology. Plus after 15 successful years with Epson I wanted to stick with the brand. In fact I really wanted to buy the 2000 (not the 2030) which is the internet version and retails for only $899 instead of $999. But it wasn't available and I needed a replacement of my broken machine. But even at $999 this was significantly cheaper than other Epson machines and it is clearly seen as a superior brand in this category which they basically invented. If you can get the 2000 for $899 that is the way to go as the specs are nearly identical.
My expectations were high on what the image would be like but they were met in spades. The quality is truly crystal clear sharp like HD television. The one criticism is that the projector's zoom is too good. By that I mean it can project to an enormous image. But since I only have an 80 inch screen and I am using this in a 15 foot room it created a little problem for me. My old projector needed to be quite a distance away to fill the scrren, but the new projectors are much more powerful in terms of zoom. To get it to fit my screen properly, the projector needed to be only about 6-8 feet from the screen. This is a little bit of a pain because I wanted to put it in the cabinet at the back of my room. But from 15 feet or so it can't make an image of "only" 80 inches. In fact at that distance its close to twice as big. I've sorted this out but you may want to study the dimensions of your room and where your wires are. There are projectors know as "short throw". This may be the way to go but you will have to study this further. If you do a google search or check out the manufacturer's site you can find out the distance need to create x sized image. Basically there is a manual zoom on the projector like on binoculars this can only do so much up or down the rest is accomplished by distance. The further away you are the bigger the image the closer the smaller.
Overall I am very pleased and I'm definitely keeping this machine. Its functionality and menus are far superior to my old machine and it is really easy to work with. Movies are awesome and so is football. I'm totally satisfied.
PS I also went out and bought Apple TV to be able to view all my photos and other content. Its only $99 and allows your lap top to connect wirelessly to the projector but I learned you have to have Mountain Lion only a $20 upgrade and that now make the projector even more functional for me. Its cool to surf the internet, Netflix, Amazon prime movies on your laptop and then push play and have the projector play the movie wirelessly.
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