Setup I set the JVC up for testing approximately 13 feet away from an 80-inch wide (92-inch diagonal) Stewart GrayHawk RS screen in my light-controlled, medium-gray home theater room. With the Normal lamp setting selected, overall screen brightness proved to be a bit lower than with JVC's previous model, although it compared favorably here to other DLP, LCD, and LCoS-based projectors I've tested over the past two years. A fair amount of color fringing was visible on crosshatch test patterns during setup. These could be adjusted for somewhat by using the projector's horizontal and vertical Pixel adjust feature, which lets you separately adjust the red, green, and blue display in single-pixel increments. But the global nature of these controls meant that I could only get the center part of the image perfectly solid - alignment remained slightly off at the sides, although the issue was mainly visible only on test patterns.

The HD100 has a large selection of what JVC calls "Image Profiles" to store custom picture settings for quick recall via direct access keys on the remote. There are three presets: Dynamic, Natural, and Cinema. Each one of these can be customized to taste and stored using the projector's Profile Memory menu, and there are also three User profiles that provide an empty slate for you to store your full range of picture settings.

When working with the JVC, I found that its Cinema preset delivered a very satisfying, punchy picture with natural-looking color. Other settings that I selected during setup included Standard HDMI Input level, Auto HDMI color space, Low color temperature (changed to Custom later on during calibration), and Normal Gamma (this mode worked very well for a wide range of programs). The JVC gives tweakers numerous options to customize its gamma curve (the linearity of the intermediate gray steps between black and white) and store the results. When in Custom mode, you start out by choosing a reference gamma correction value between 1.8 and 2.6, and then make adjustments to the curve using an onscreen graph. And along with a global adjustment, you can also separately adjust the projector's red, green, and blue gamma curves.

Picture Quality The main claim to fame for the HD-1, JVC's previous projector, was its stunning native picture contrast. When watching movies with dark scenes, the blacks had truly cinematic depth. And because the projector didn't use an iris control to manually or dynamically modify the level of light coming from the projector's bulb, white highlights in the picture retained a consistent level of brightness across a range of scenes. With the HD-100, overall picture contrast proved to be even better than with the HD-1 - measurably better. Watching a reference scene from a Blu-ray disc of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the black of outer space was a deep, velvety tone, while the white highlights of both the Jupiter Mission ship and the myriad star clusters in the background gave the image very satisfying punch and depth. But the JVC's performance here wasn't just a matter of black and white: Watching an earlier scene where the proto-Human Apes cling to each other in a cave, there was plenty of lighter gray shadow detail visible in the creatures' dark fur, as well as in the rock outcroppings that they huddled against.

Switching from sci-fi to historical drama, I next watched an HD DVD of director Joe Wright's take on Pride and Prejudice. This movie offers up stunning widescreen vistas of the English Countryside where the story takes place. Watching a scene where Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) rests beside an ancient tree during a journey to visit North Country relatives, the JVC's crisp display brought out all of the details in the tree's deeply furrowed bark and the carpet-like moss blanketing its roots. Skin tones in this scene and others looked natural - Elizabeth's slightly yellow, buttermilk complexion easily came through. Colors on the JVC generally looked well saturated, uniform, and clean. That said, in another scene where Elizabeth walks alongside a brook with a soldier, I thought that the soldier's red coat and the green fields in the background appeared somewhat too rich; I was forced to reach for the remote and knock the color control down a few steps.

Bottom Line JVC's DLA-HD100 offers a definite edge over its previous standout D-ILA model, the HD-1, in one key performance area: picture contrast. And it does so without the use of an iris control - something that must have the rest of the industry scratching its collective head. Whether or not the boost in contrast ratio - along with extra amenities like powered zoom and focus, and HDMI 1.3 jacks - is enough to justify the $8,000 price tag of JVC's new projector will ultimately be a matter of personal taste and budget. But if you're the kind of film fanatic who demands crisp, punchy pictures with endlessly deep blacks from your front projector, the HD100 will most certainly do the trick.

Test Reports RSS Feed More Test Reports Back to Homepage What's New on S&V