JVC DLA-HD1

Introduction

The advances made in the past few years in the front-projector market are truly astounding. Just three short years ago, you could buy a Sony Qualia 1080p projector for $25K that had a stated contrast ratio of 3000:1. Sony made a lot of noise the following year with the release of the Ruby, which improved on the performance of the Qualia, but at a retail price of only $10K! Then, in late 2006, a new slew of 1080p projectors came to the masses from the likes of Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Optoma, and JVC with prices breaking the $6,299 barrier, and some even for under $5,000. What is so amazing about these prices and projectors is not only have the prices dropped faster than the NASDAQ index during the dot-com meltdown, but the performance of these projectors has gotten consistently better each year.

Cosmetics & Setup

My experience with home theater projectors was really quite limited to more of the “business models,” namely, smaller and more compact footprints. So I was quite surprised at the size of the box when the JVC arrived at my home. Seeing that it was double boxed, though, I thought that it would be much smaller until I noticed that the outer box was flush against the JVC’s shipping box, and it really was quite large. The projector measures about 18” x 6.5” x 16.5” (W x H x D) and weighs in at about 25.5 lbs. The JVC’s exterior is quite pleasing with its high-gloss black finish and a silver streak that runs down the middle. The only downfall of the casing is that it does allow some light spill into the room above and below the screen, although this is only noticeable when it is a completely dark image on the screen (when a HD DVD is loading with a blank screen).

Mounting the projector was a snap using my Chief universal mount, but with the weight of the projector, I would suggest you enlist some help in ceiling mounting because of the size and weight. Once mounted, it was a snap to set up. The projector has a manual vertical and horizontal lens shift (±80% vertical and ±34% horizontal). While not as spiffy as a motorized one, it worked quite well and was easy to align with my screen. The projected image can be anywhere from 60 inches to as high as 200 inches with the X2 Manual zoom/focus lens (f=21.3-42.6mm F=3.2-4.3). For my viewing purposes, I am projecting an 88” diagonal picture onto a Stewart Firehawk 1.3 gain screen.

The lamp in the projector is a 200-watt, ultra-high-pressure mercury lamp with a rated lifetime of 2,000 hours, regardless if you use it in the normal lamp setting or in the high-powered mode. Replacement lamps have a suggested retail price of $400, but I have seen them for about 30% less online. When you power on the projector, it takes about 60 seconds or so to get a picture as the bulb warms up, which is about normal in my experience for a front projector.

Connections on the rear of the projector are well laid out and include two HDMI ports, one S-Video, one composite video, one component video, as well as an RS-232C terminal. For all of my testing purposes, I used one of the HDMI inputs since that is the only cable that I have run through my ceiling to my projector mount. There are LED indicators and controls on the top of the unit, as well, that have little use in my situation since I have it ceiling mounted.

Once I had the projector mounted and hooked up to my source components, it was time to take it for a test ride. As with all projectors, once you get it hooked up, it is time to align the image to your screen. This process took me about fifteen minutes, and since I had it ceiling mounted, I needed to enter the user menu and flip the image both horizontally and vertically in order to have the proper viewing on my screen. I then pulled up a supplied convergence pattern and focussed the lens and made sure that the image was properly aligned with my screen. One of the cool and useful features of this projector is the ability to finely adjust the pixels (red, green and blue) both horizontally and vertically on the screen in case one of the three panels is misaligned. In my particular case, I needed to move the vertical red one pixel to the right in order for the panels to be perfectly aligned. As a former CRT rear-projection TV owner, I am a stickler when it comes to convergence and being able to adjust this in the projector is a big plus in my book!

The supplied backlit remote is laid out extremely well with direct access to often used adjustments such as the direct input selection, contrast and brightness, image profile (gamma), as well as other adjustments that you usually have to delve into the user menu to find. The user menu itself is laid out in a very user-friendly manner with access to all of the functions that you will need to properly set up the projector. Included in selections is a proprietary Image Offset, which is used for adjusting the grayscale of the unit with adjustments for Red, Green & Blue. Adjusting one of these colors affects the grayscale on both the low IRE’a and the High IRE’s. Traditionally, these are adjusted with cuts and drives for each respective color, but this implementation worked pretty well and calibration of the grayscale was a snap (more on this later).

Features

The HD1 uses JVC’s D-ILA (Direct-drive Light Amplifier) technology, which is essentially their branded version of LCOS (Liquid Crystal On Silicone). The technology also has evolved to the point that there is no screen door effect with this projector at all, even getting as close as twelve inches from my screen. The HD1 also employs a new optical engine with wire-grid polarizers which assist the projector in achieving it’s stated contrast rate of 15,000:1 without the use of a dynamic iris. I measured the peak contrast ratio at 8,611:1, which is under the specified range but still an excellent number from a digital projector.

Since the projected image must come through a lens system, this is a very important part of the feature set of a projector. The lens used in this projector is an all glass, Fusion lens system with sixteen elements in thirteen groups, which has excellent focus all through the projected image, whether in the middle of the screen or in one of the far corners. My previous projector was noticeably softer in the corners due to the lower-quality lens employed, so my hats off to JVC for using a quality lens system.

Since this projector is a native 1080p (1920 x 1080), with the exception of HD DVD and Blu-ray, most of the sources that will be fed to the projector will need to be scaled in one way or another. JVC has chosen to work with Gennum in this regard and utilizes their GF9351 chip for the internal processing. The video processor features four VXP technologies: FineEdge for handling jaggies; FidelityEngine for noise reduction; TruMotionHD for de-interlacing that supports HD signals (1080i), converting them to 1080p signals for playback; and RealityExpansion, which is 10-bit image procession technology for upsampling 4:2:2 (Y:Cb:Cr) video signals to the 4:4:4 format.

All projectors need to have a cooling fan in them in order to keep the electronics cool from the high-watt lamps that are used to drive the picture. The JVC’s fan is rated at 25 dB and at no time do I ever feel that the fan is intrusive to the viewing environment. It is audible during the quietest of scenes, however, it’s pitch is such that it doesn’t call attention to itself.

Calibration

I have approximately 150 hours of viewing time with the JVC with a variety of sources that include cable TV, HD DVD, Blu-ray disc, DVD, and even some gaming with an XBOX 360. I routed all of my sources through a Denon 4806CI utilizing its sole HDMI output going directly to the projector with a 10-meter Accell Ultra HDMI cable. My first task was to perform a quick calibration of the brightness, contrast and color using both the standard-definition DVD of Digital Video Essentials as well as the HD DVD. Fortunately, the settings were identical to each other whether from a HD source or SD.

After the 20-hour mark, I performed a grayscale calibration, which was very easy to achieve. The out of the box settings measured very close to D65, but the green channel was a little hot (Middle color temp, Natural Image Profile). After calibration, though, the grayscale was nearly perfect across the IRE range at D65K, with an acceptable gamma of 2.26 and a peak of 18fL (pre and post calibrations are pictured below). I then measured the color points and discovered that the green was slightly oversaturated and blue and red were as well, but much less so. I took all of these measurements using Milori Colorfacts 6.0 with the readings taken off my Stewart Firehawk screen. Since this is a gray screen, it could be contaminating the readings a bit, but at no time did I find the oversaturated green a problem in actual viewing material.

On a final note, in the calibration process when being fed a completely dark material (10 IRE window), I noticed that the corners were slightly brighter than the center of the screen. If you look carefully, this can be seen in actual viewing material as well, but only the most critical of viewers will most likely notice it.

Performance

Since I review so many movies, about 85% of my viewing time spent with the projector was with HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs, and they have never looked so good! I currently use the Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player that outputs a 1080i signal. The JVC handled this material well and properly deinterlaced it into a 1080p output. During my evaluation period, Sony updated the PS3 with the 1080p/24 output, so I was able to test this aspect of the JVC as well. It accepted the signal properly, but does not display it in a native 24-fps format. It takes the 24-fps signal and then displays it at 96-fps (direct multiplier of 24), which all but eliminated any judder from the source. This is my preferred input mode from my high-defintion sources, and here’s hoping that the HD DVD camp comes up with a 1080p/24 solution soon.

For DVD playback, I currently use an Oppo 970-HD DVD player that outputs 480i over HDMI. Unfortunately, the JVC doesn’t perform very well with a 480i source over HDMI, and its deinterlacing capabilities of the 480i-1080p conversion are sub-par. I used the jaggies test on the HQV benchmark DVD and the results were average at best. What was worse, though, is that I am able to notice jaggies in regular viewing material as well, specifically the DVD of “Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire” that I was watching with my kids. Changing the Oppo’s output to 480p helped eliminate some of the jaggies, but its performance wasn’t a big improvement over the JVC and only served to soften up the picture a bit. Luckily, most of my viewing these days is of high-definition sources, so this minor fault in the player isn’t a deal killer for me personally, and an upgrade of my DVD player utilizing some HQV processing may be in my future.

For standard-definition cable broadcasts, the JVC performed as well as could be expected and rivaled the output from a Lumagen VisionHDP video processor that I have used for the past two years. One of the nice features of the Gennum processing is its noise-reduction, which is able to filter out most of the noise from a standard-definition source without softening the picture. Their FidelityEngine works as promised in this regard, which is a welcome sight. I don’t have much time for regular TV watching, but it’s nice to know that this feature is available when I need it.

My final viewing tests were using an XBOX 360 for some gaming. The XBOX was set to an output of 720p, since most of the games were native 720p games and I wanted to see how well the JVC performed the conversion from 720p to 1080p with some real world material. Everything tested fine here, and I noticed no game lag whatsoever with the additional processing being applied by the JVC; gaming on a front-projection system is a sight to behold, and it is quite addictive, so beware!

A big complaint with front projectors, specifically with LCD and LCOS, is that their black levels leave a lot to be desired. My previous projector was a Mitsubishi 3000U, which is a DLP model that has traditionally delivered better black levels as a technology compared to LCD and LCOS. In comparison, though, the JVC is the new leader in this category. The black levels and shadow detail are outstanding, and although they aren’t as good as a CRT system, they are close enough not to care anymore. What this added black level adds to the picture is increased dimensionality and depth to the picture, especially during scenes where both dark and bright objects are on screen at the same time. My first “WOW” experience with this was during an ESPN broadcast of “Baseball Tonight,” with the black floor and neon lights on their set. I was simply blown away by the picture quality that greeted my eyes.

Conclusion

I’ve had the fortunate experience of living with the JVC in my home for the past five weeks, and it has exceeded my expectations on what a 1080p projector brings to the table. The picture that it generates from great sources, namely HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc, is spectacular, and it even does some resolution-starved sources such as cable TV justice. There are a few nits to pick with the projector, but for a MSRP of $6,299, the price/performance value of this projector is outstanding, and you will be very hard pressed to find a projector costing twice as much giving you a noticeable improvement in picture quality.

Review System

RGB Before Calibration:

RGB After Calibration:

Grayscale Tracking Before Calibration:

Grayscale tracking After Calibration:

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