JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

[DavidHir]

Watched " Hacksaw Ridge " again last night with friends and my wife, who hadn't seen it. The movie looks amazing - really a great reference disc for this projector. A mighty fine film too I might add. I forgot I had left it on dimming mode 1 and manual iris -4 ( -4 is still plenty bright on my 128" diagonal 2.35:1 ST 130 screen, and helps a little with contrast ). Anyway, the night scenes in the foxhole on the battlefield looked outstanding. Superior detail compared to my previous setting of mode 2.

The standard BD is a mess: full of banding and artifacts.  Should have never passed QC.  I'll buy the UHD BD one of these days.

[AVSCraig]

I haven't bothered to watch the BR that came with it. That's too bad. You would think they could get both the BR and the 4K UHD BR right these days.

[rak306]

The standard BD is a mess: full of banding and artifacts.  Should have never passed QC.  I'll buy the UHD BD one of these days.

I saw some banding on the UHD version in a sky scene at the beginning of the film, but not in later scenes where that I thought would be susceptible to banding (a sunrise scene with sky gradient).  This was on a RS600, with custom gamma curve, though, so YMMV.

[John Schuermann]

By show of hands, it appeared that several at our Denver Home Theater Seminar found out about our event from this Forum - sincere thanks for being there, especially those that flew in specifically just to see us! We all hope you had a good time  And for those of you who missed the event don't forget that we have an additional seminar planned for this Saturday, March 18, in Colorado Springs. While the overall seminar schedule will be the same, this time we will have the JVC DLA-RS4500 and DLA-RS620 JVC projectors (and screens from Stewart) in the same room. Same is true for the Revel F208 / C208 / M106 surround system and JBL M2 / LSR708i / S2S-EX / C763L Atmos system. The Colorado Springs event will be from 1-6 pm at the Colorado Springs Marriott, 5580 Tech Center Dr, Colorado Springs, CO 80919. Chris Deutsch from JVC and Gregg Loewen from THX will be special presenters.

For anyone who attended the Denver event on Saturday, we'd like to invite you back to the Colorado Springs event at no charge. We found out after checking a few sound anomalies during our Saturday session that the JBL M2 Master Studio Reference Monitors and S2S-EX subwoofers were mis-calibrated. If you’d like another chance to audition these amazing speakers, please feel free to attend our Colorado Springs event this Saturday. Again, not a sales event - this is educational only.

Thanks to our friends at AV Science Discussions for letting us post about this! Here is a direct link to our Facebook event page if you'd like to sign up: https://www.facebook.com/events/1671605399799663/

[ozhdht]

Wanted to share some feedback here (not as widely as on AVS) from a industry calibrator contact of mine who got to spend time with the 4500 in dedicated demo room and calibrate a few modes with an eye to see how the unit would perform in a professional post production application. I found his comments about DCI filter mode vs rec.2020 mode interesting as I swear I thought DCI was meant to possess the widest colour gamut with the filter in place and that rec.2020 was a non-filter mode that goes as far as possible without a filter.

Anyway, here's the observations he made and shared:

All measurements were taken using the FilmLight ‘Truelight’ projector probe (spectrometer+colorimeter mode) and verified against a Photo Research PR655 instrument - the numbers obtained by the two measuring devices were very close (<0.5% difference) so I am confident that the results are accurate.
 
These tests were primarily concerned with the DCI ‘P3’ performance of the projector as this is the main interest for typical film grading suites, however the performance of Rec.709 was also checked.
 
Out of the box the so-called ‘DCI’ profile was a little off in terms of the white point and gamut. The red and green primaries were very close to the DCI P3 spec but the blue was somewhat undersaturated. Even after manually applying correction to the white point and primaries it seemed impossible to get the blue primary to reach the full P3 gamut:

JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

I am a little unsure as to exactly what the different ‘profiles’ set internally inside the projector but my guess is that they are applying some sort of target gamut mapping onto the native gamut of the primaries. This data I assume is recorded into the projector memory as part of the initial factory calibration as it will vary from projector to projector and would require specialist equipment (ie. a spectrometer) to do accurately.
 
My next test was therefore to start with a profile labelled ‘custom’ (with a D65 white point) - I assumed that this would either not apply any gamut mapping or at least give me access to the projector primaries which I would then be able to manually adjust. However, as can be seen below, the gamut was actually much smaller (close to sRGB/Rec.709) than the DCI profile and I was again unable to push the primaries out any further - they could however be brought in! The white point was again very close to D65 without any adjustment.
 

JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

The third test was to start with the Rec.2020 profile - this did have a larger gamut than DCI (which I would expect) although not the full Rec. 2020 colour space. This is reasonable as the projector does not claim to cover the full Rec.2020 gamut and in fact I am not aware of any projector in this price range which can do so. Again, I adjusted the primaries and this time I was able to achieve a very close match to the target DCI P3 primaries (as measured by both the Truelight projector probe and the PR655). The chart below shows these results. Note that I also made a very slight adjustment to the brightness setting to give the correct black cutoff point.

JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

 
Once fully adjusted you can see that the white point is very close to the standard DCI white point and that the primaries are also very close. I was also able to shift the white point to D65 using the colour temperature controls in the projector without any significant change to the primaries which leads me to believe that the colour matrixing in the unit is pretty accurate.
 
The projector was producing a contrast ratio of around 5000:1 in this mode which is perfectly acceptable for colour grading and in the right environment (in conjunction with the high power lamp setting) would probably be ok for HDR work - although I would need to do a whole different set of tests in order to accurately check out the HDR profiling of the projector. As you know it is still very early days for the grading of movies in HDR, especially on smaller projectors such as the Z1 and I would need to first obtain appropriate display transforms in order to get sensible results for HDR. The luminance level was measured to be around 100cd/m2 with the lamp set to its medium value - this is somewhat high for standard DCI grading but it can be offset using the projector’s aperture adjustment or via the display profile if using a grading system such as Baselight and of course it would be lower on a larger screen.
 
From a configuration and usability perspective I would say that the process of setting it up could be made easier. The following factors make it a little hard to set up in the dark environment of a typical grading theatre:
- Menu system is a little tricky to navigate using the remote control
- As soon as you adjust most parameters they are stored into the current mode setting. It is therefore easy to accidentally adjust something you have already set - I would prefer all controls to allow you to make changes interactively and then choose to save them, or not.
-  It is not entirely clear what the adjustments for the colour primaries (Color Management setting: Axis Position, Hue, Saturation, Brightness) are doing. I would prefer to see simple x,y adjustments for each primary. There also appeared to be interaction between some of the parameters although it wasn’t obvious what was going on. Finally, these adjustments didn’t appear to behave in a very linear fashion - changing the Axis position for example would have no visible effect at all for a few steps in value and then it would suddenly jump. This could imply excessive precision rounding in the internal processing or maybe a processing or UI bug.
 
For ease of calibration and setup I would prefer to have a software tool which I could run on a laptop - connected via the ethernet port on the back of the projector. The laptop could then be used to store and download profiles into the projector’s memories which could then be selected using the remote.

[jetsen]

For ease of calibration and setup I would prefer to have a software tool which I could run on a laptop - connected via the ethernet port on the back of the projector. The laptop could then be used to store and download profiles into the projector’s memories which could then be selected using the remote.

Download the JVC Calibration software and you can do exactly what you describe, simple as that ;-)

It is not entirely clear what the adjustments for the colour primaries (Color Management setting: Axis Position, Hue, Saturation, Brightness) are doing. I would prefer to see simple x,y adjustments for each primary. There also appeared to be interaction between some of the parameters although it wasn’t obvious what was going on.

They do exactly what the say, Hue changes the color of the primary (secondary), saturation the saturation and brightness changes the luminance of the color. The are the x,y and Y parameters.
Interaction between those parameters is in every single projector I have ever calibrated over the past 15 years

[ozhdht]

Download the JVC Calibration software and you can do exactly what you describe, simple as that ;-)

They do exactly what the say, Hue changes the color of the primary (secondary), saturation the saturation and brightness changes the luminance of the color. The are the x,y and Y parameters.
Interaction between those parameters is in every single projector I have ever calibrated over the past 15 years

Yeah I was kind of wondering what this pro guy was saying when he said software as surely JVC would have pointed out their software to him. I'm going to go back with that suggestion.

[AVSCraig]

Holy crap - Passengers in 4K looked absolutely amazing on the RS4500 ! Stunning picture ! Fun movie too !

[AVSMike]

Wanted to share some feedback here (not as widely as on AVS) from a industry calibrator contact of mine who got to spend time with the 4500 in dedicated demo room and calibrate a few modes with an eye to see how the unit would perform in a professional post production application. I found his comments about DCI filter mode vs rec.2020 mode interesting as I swear I thought DCI was meant to possess the widest colour gamut with the filter in place and that rec.2020 was a non-filter mode that goes as far as possible without a filter.

Anyway, here's the observations he made and shared:

All measurements were taken using the FilmLight ‘Truelight’ projector probe (spectrometer+colorimeter mode) and verified against a Photo Research PR655 instrument - the numbers obtained by the two measuring devices were very close (<0.5% difference) so I am confident that the results are accurate.
 
These tests were primarily concerned with the DCI ‘P3’ performance of the projector as this is the main interest for typical film grading suites, however the performance of Rec.709 was also checked.
 
Out of the box the so-called ‘DCI’ profile was a little off in terms of the white point and gamut. The red and green primaries were very close to the DCI P3 spec but the blue was somewhat undersaturated. Even after manually applying correction to the white point and primaries it seemed impossible to get the blue primary to reach the full P3 gamut:

JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

I am a little unsure as to exactly what the different ‘profiles’ set internally inside the projector but my guess is that they are applying some sort of target gamut mapping onto the native gamut of the primaries. This data I assume is recorded into the projector memory as part of the initial factory calibration as it will vary from projector to projector and would require specialist equipment (ie. a spectrometer) to do accurately.
 
My next test was therefore to start with a profile labelled ‘custom’ (with a D65 white point) - I assumed that this would either not apply any gamut mapping or at least give me access to the projector primaries which I would then be able to manually adjust. However, as can be seen below, the gamut was actually much smaller (close to sRGB/Rec.709) than the DCI profile and I was again unable to push the primaries out any further - they could however be brought in! The white point was again very close to D65 without any adjustment.
 

JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

The third test was to start with the Rec.2020 profile - this did have a larger gamut than DCI (which I would expect) although not the full Rec. 2020 colour space. This is reasonable as the projector does not claim to cover the full Rec.2020 gamut and in fact I am not aware of any projector in this price range which can do so. Again, I adjusted the primaries and this time I was able to achieve a very close match to the target DCI P3 primaries (as measured by both the Truelight projector probe and the PR655). The chart below shows these results. Note that I also made a very slight adjustment to the brightness setting to give the correct black cutoff point.

JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

 
Once fully adjusted you can see that the white point is very close to the standard DCI white point and that the primaries are also very close. I was also able to shift the white point to D65 using the colour temperature controls in the projector without any significant change to the primaries which leads me to believe that the colour matrixing in the unit is pretty accurate.
 
The projector was producing a contrast ratio of around 5000:1 in this mode which is perfectly acceptable for colour grading and in the right environment (in conjunction with the high power lamp setting) would probably be ok for HDR work - although I would need to do a whole different set of tests in order to accurately check out the HDR profiling of the projector. As you know it is still very early days for the grading of movies in HDR, especially on smaller projectors such as the Z1 and I would need to first obtain appropriate display transforms in order to get sensible results for HDR. The luminance level was measured to be around 100cd/m2 with the lamp set to its medium value - this is somewhat high for standard DCI grading but it can be offset using the projector’s aperture adjustment or via the display profile if using a grading system such as Baselight and of course it would be lower on a larger screen.
 
From a configuration and usability perspective I would say that the process of setting it up could be made easier. The following factors make it a little hard to set up in the dark environment of a typical grading theatre:
- Menu system is a little tricky to navigate using the remote control
- As soon as you adjust most parameters they are stored into the current mode setting. It is therefore easy to accidentally adjust something you have already set - I would prefer all controls to allow you to make changes interactively and then choose to save them, or not.
-  It is not entirely clear what the adjustments for the colour primaries (Color Management setting: Axis Position, Hue, Saturation, Brightness) are doing. I would prefer to see simple x,y adjustments for each primary. There also appeared to be interaction between some of the parameters although it wasn’t obvious what was going on. Finally, these adjustments didn’t appear to behave in a very linear fashion - changing the Axis position for example would have no visible effect at all for a few steps in value and then it would suddenly jump. This could imply excessive precision rounding in the internal processing or maybe a processing or UI bug.
 
For ease of calibration and setup I would prefer to have a software tool which I could run on a laptop - connected via the ethernet port on the back of the projector. The laptop could then be used to store and download profiles into the projector’s memories which could then be selected using the remote.

For mode selection you have:

Rec709
BT2020   Filter in place for UHD using BT2020 container.
HDR    No filter in place but wider than Rec709 (86% DCI color space)
DCI   Filter in place for DCI content (not using BT2020 container)

HDR is the mode that gives as wide of a color space as possible without the filter in place for use with UHD HDR.

[ozhdht]

For mode selection you have:

Rec709
BT2020   Filter in place for UHD using BT2020 container.
HDR    No filter in place but wider than Rec709 (86% DCI color space)
DCI   Filter in place for DCI content (not using BT2020 container)

HDR is the mode that gives as wide of a color space as possible without the filter in place for use with UHD HDR.

Of course, thanks Mike. Been a week or so since I've watched any UHD, so I was forgetting that BT2020 does indeed use the filter and confusing it with HDR mode. I probably slipped back into the old RS500 frame of reference after spending last weekend with mine again at my weekender .  Of course DCI mode would be extremely irrelevant to most of us end users as opposed to post production houses.

[jetsen]

The new firmware is online http://www3.jvckenwood.com/english/download/dla-z1_rs4500/

Not a lot of info regarding the "specific conditions" where the dynamic function is improved.

[Pultzar]

So just got my copy of Planet Earth II Blu-Ray 4K HDR with no 4K projector to view it on.  Has anybody watched it on a RS4500 yet?

[ozhdht]

So just got my copy of Planet Earth II Blu-Ray 4K HDR with no 4K projector to view it on.  Has anybody watched it on a RS4500 yet?

Yep got it two days ago locally. I've watched it on other displays like my Sony Z9 in 1080p upscaled around the time it went to air. The UHD disc is pretty spectacular on the 4500. I watched parts of each episode on the first disc the other night.

[AVSCraig]

The new firmware is online http://www3.jvckenwood.com/english/download/dla-z1_rs4500/

Not a lot of info regarding the "specific conditions" where the dynamic function is improved.

Anyone download it and try it yet ? I can't since I'm out of town for the weekend.

[ozhdht]

Anyone download it and try it yet ? I can't since I'm out of town for the weekend.

I made some early comments back on the AVSForum Owner's thread. I only had an hour with it last night. Mike posted a bit more on the other thread, which you're probably across by now. He seems to been more impressed with the Dynamic Dimming improvement than I was in my brief viewing late night viewing session. I should have noted some scenes to test before and after like he did.