JVC HD1 - My morning with the guys at JVC UK.
First things first, some background….
For those that don’t know me and what I do we are one of the premier UK dealers for high end cinema build and full home automation systems along with the ever continuing 2 channel side of things. We have been one of the few dealers in the UK who have a Sony Qualia along with selling large numbers of Ruby, and now the Pearl….so I have seen a lot of SXRD and what the sonys are good and bad at. For your reference I run a Sony Ruby at home with perfect convergence coupled with a Lumagen HDQ / Stewart screen and all ISF calibrated, my normal reference display at work is a Qualia, again with Lumagen and Stewart.
I had an excellent presentation from Akira Kobayashi, project leader for the HD1 and asked loads of questions over lunch.
HD1 – Firstly some info that you guys will want to know,
•How does it look: Gorgeous! It’s finished in a metallic black and silver casing, approx the same length as the pearl only slightly wider and about the same weight as a pearl.
•Connectivity – 2 x HDMI, 1 x component, 1 x composite, 1 x s-video. The component can also be used with the composite to feed RGB and Sync (nice touch).
•Remote – backlit, discrete source selection and power on/off codes.
•Lumens- 700 when the unit is placed at its closest throw, 18-20% variance over its zoom range.
•Contrast Ratio – the new panels that have been designed are capable of 20000:1, when coupled with the new grid polarizer’s the unit measures 15000:1
•Convergence: user adjustable 1 pixel in both horizontal and vertical direction.
•Lens: High Res Fujinon 2 x zoom lens, so basically with a 100” screen the unit can be positioned from 3 to 6m away. It uses 16 elements in 13 groups to significantly reduce lens aberration and ensure perfect focus.
•Lens Shift: Manual +/- 80% vertical and +/- 34% Horizontal.
The Demo:
The room was totally light controlled with a 120” Stewart Greyhawk screen, source material fed from a media player with HD content recorded from Japanese off air broadcast along with some SD material from a JVC deck and an xbox360. The sources were fed to a gefen switch and then distribution amp to feed both the RS1 and Sony Pearl.
The Pearl: It was a good unit, focus was excellent with no more than half a pixel convergence error other than the extreme left which was 1 pixel out in the red. Lamp was set to high, Iris set to auto 1, colour temp low, gamma none.
The HD1: Again convergence looked bang on, and is also user adjustable by one pixel in both directions, colour uniformity looked better than most pearls I have seen. I looked through all of the internal test patterns the unit has and its focus was very very sharp with excellent edge definition and when looking at greyscale ramps it looked very close to d65.
Clip one: Pirates of the Caribbean showing a scene from inside the boat with lots of low level detail and extreme whites (jack sparrow leaning over some fruit talking to barbossa) we continually swapped between the two projectors and the difference was vast, I mean really obvious, the black level between the two was unchanged, but it was the punch and vibrancy of the whites that was so amazing, The white detail of the JVC was excellent with no compression of detail, with at the same time all of the detail within the blacks unaltered.
Clip two: Classic starlit space scene from Star wars, again swapping between the two units made 2 things apparent, firstly there was no obvious difference in black level, but the stars were so amazingly vibrant with lack of ringing and edge clarity from very white to inky black that I simply have not seen since on any other digital.
Other Clips: with the point made that ansi contrast was very good we then looked at a number of other clips, HD Video material of European jewellery with very high levels of detail, it was apparent on these clips that there were some artifacts in the motion in terms of de-interlacing, but this was still coped with better than the pearl, just not good as what I am used to seeing through my Lumagen.
Summary:
What a cracking projector and huge thanks to the guys for letting me spend so much time with it and answering all my questions. I might get a unit to play with next week for a more in depth look. The unit is set to launch end of Jan assuming production goes to plan, and I look forward to showing it at a product launch in the near future, get those orders in now!