The first thing I do when I install a projector is dial it in as best as I can. This is a lengthy process, but an important one. I also have quite a few test patterns that I rely on to evaluate sharpness, resolution, color accuracy, and more. With all the hype surrounding this projector, I was really interested in seeing just how good it would do with my tests and how it stacked up against the SXRD projectors I'd played around with, and my reference VP11S1 DLP projector.
After I got everything up and going and brightness and contrast set, I put up a cross hatch pattern to evaluate focus and convergence. Since this is a three-chip design, the old issue of panel alignment comes into play. Moving up to the screen revealed quite a bit of mis-convergence in the lower half of the image. JVC offers a panel adjustment option in the menu to alleviate this issue but it is not nearly fine enough for the adjustments I needed to make. The adjustments are made in full pixel increments where this projector was showing about a half a pixel of misalignment. Half a pixel doesn't sound like much, but it was exaggerated by the chromatic aberration the lens was producing. This manifests a lot like mis-convergence but usually affects the outer edges of the screen. It's caused by distortion of different color wavelengths in the lens. This projector suffered from it quite a bit as I looked farther out to the edges of the screen. The only way to remedy this is a better lens, so maybe this is something JVC will address in later designs.
After I had focus dialed in and the convergence dialed in as best as I could, I evaluated resolution and uniformity. The recent Sony SXRD projectors have all had continuing issues with uniformity, and I wanted to see if that carried on in this design. Unfortunately it did. The corners of the image showed an obvious lightness compared to the center of the image. This wasn't very distracting during normal viewing, but it was noticeable and affects overall contrast across the image.
Another issue I've seen with SXRD projectors is resolution. While most true 1080p projectors do offer one-to-one pixel mapping, they don't always resolve the full Nyquist resolution offered by the resolution. The gamma seems to be the main offender, causing an obvious roll-off and smearing of detail when you look at a luma burst at the full resolution of 1080p. The JVC showed the same issue as the Sony designs, though to a lesser degree. You could make out the lines of resolution, but the transitions between the lines were mainly gray instead of their intended white. To date, the only 1080p projectors I've seen that can actually resolve the full resolution of 1080p with no distortion are the DLP designs.
One of the biggest offenders on this projector though is its color accuracy. The primaries are quite a way out from their intended position in the CIE color triangle, resulting in colors that are a bit saturated. In reality, some people may actually like this, as it gives images more pop and color saturation. But in my position, I need to ensure accuracy can be achieved, especially if I'm going to use the projector for evaluation of other hardware and software. The nice thing is, the reproducible range of colors is outside of the intended positions. This can sometimes be dialed in to near perfection in a service menu or ISF menu. I would rather have the colors outside the triangle and dial them in than find they're inside the triangle and can't be increased (a problem I've seen with other designs).
Unfortunately, JVC has not included any option to dial in primaries or secondaries. This wouldn't be as big of a deal to me if the colors were pretty close (like the Marantz VP11S1, which also lacks a color management system), but they weren't. The biggest offenders were green and red. Personally, I didn't think it impacted the image too much with normal viewing, but there were times when grass looked a bit on the lime side, and flesh tones were a bit hotter than they should have been. If you have a display that is accurate to compare side by side with, the difference is far more pronounced, but most people don't, so they may not notice as much.