As good as Chad's Arve curves are (I've used several he did for me) and he is a master with the tool, but the Panasonic 820 takes HDR/tone mapping up a notch. What I see on my RS440 is just a more natural rendering of HDR on the disc. More natural looking specular highlights (less clipping) and less occasional "hotness" or over-brightness I would see with the Arve curves at times. I even learned how to use the Arve tool rather well to tweak things a bit more in attempt to alleviate some of the issues I was seeing for a few specific discs in particular that just looked off to me (King Kong on UHD BD for example. I felt like I needed a separate Arve curve for this title to look right where as it looks fine on the 820). All of that is now gone with the 820. I don't see any oddities any longer or so far at least.Kris also mentioned the Arve had some color issues which are not existent on the 820.I highly recommend the 820.
@AVSCraig have you had any further updates from JVC regarding this potential upgrade for the Z1/RS4500?
What's Chad's take on the RS4500. I'm sure he's calibrated pretty much every display under the sun. Is he impressed with the performance?
I believe he said this was the 6th or 7th rs4500 he’s calibrated. He thinks they are difficult to calibrate b/c of sync times and some other quirks which make the process more tedious but that it throws an amazing image. He calibrated 4 picture modes for me. SDR for 1080p, HDR using mid laser, HDR using high laser and an SDR 2020 for the ub820. He measured 100nits for HDR with mid laser and 139nits with high laser.
Has anyone tried, or done any A/B using the panny ub820 sending HDR w/ tone mapping versus SDR 2020 w/ tone mapping to their RS4500?