PICTURE QUALITY After tweaking the JVC's User modes for my sources - HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, and high-def cable - I settled back for some quality viewing. When I watched Hollywoodland on HD DVD, the projector's crisp 1080p picture easily brought out the texture of the stucco walls on an apartment building where private eye Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) lives. I was even more impressed, however, by a scene in which Simo visits his ex-wife (Molly Parker) at her home. As the broken couple stare out of a sunroom window at their son playing in the back yard, the fine mesh of window screens rippling in the breeze looked both detailed and completely solid.

Several other scenes from Hollywoodland served to show off the JVC's exceptional color rendition, black level, and contrast. Although the film has a subdued, stylized look that aims to capture the 1950s era in which it takes place, colors like the bright red of a sports car on a sun-drenched street looked vivid and rich. Dimmer scenes, like one where Simo discusses a case in a client's hotel room, also showed a surprisingly wide range of hues. In these shots, both the deep burgundy of a chair and the bright red of the client's lipstick clearly cut through the murky surroundings, and both actors' skin tones looked completely natural as well. But the JVC proved most impressive in dark scenes like one where George Reeves (Ben Affleck) performs his Superman shtick for a camera crew on a set. Its ability to display both deep blacks and a range of shadow details really helped illuminate background objects such as camera equipment, fans, pulleys, and the clothing of the onlookers in these and other dark scenes.

Not every source you feed your projector is going to look as good as HD DVD, which is why JVC made a good move in using Gennum's VXP image processor for deinterlacing and scaling both standard and high-def signals - a high-quality solution that's gotten our thumbs-up in other gear tests. DVDs and cable TV programs upconverted by the DLA-HD1 generally looked solid and clear. Its noise-reduction processing tended to obscure picture detail at high settings, however, so I preferred to switch that option off.

BOTTOM LINE At $6,300, JVC's DLA-HD1 isn't the cheapest 1080p front projector available, but it definitely ranks with the best in the under-$10K brood. Its crisp picture, vivid, natural colors, and eye-popping contrast (even without an iris!) make it a must-see option for anyone looking to score an affordable 1080p model. In fact, there are no serious negatives I can apply to the JVC DLA-HD1 1080p D-ILA front projector other than that I'll soon have to send my review unit back. Rack one up for JVC.

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