2018 CEDIA projector thread

[Paul Heroy]

What about the Wolf PRO-817 laser driven DLP using the XPR chip? It's received some very good notice elsewhere. $10k.

[Dylan Seeger]

Wolf doesn't usually get talked about too much because they're simply rebadging other projectors and calling them their own. That model seems to be an Optoma UHZ65 laser projector in a fancy chassis. I'm sure out of the box, color/greyscale/gamma ect all look better than what you get from a UHZ65, but that's a big premium to pay for it.

[AVSCraig]

The only DLP faux k that I thought looked pretty good was the Hisense dual laser.

The 3000 looked good, but I felt I saw a "vibrating" to the image. Not sure if this was the eshift or what it was. Someone else said he saw the same. Hopefully this is isolated to the pre-production unit.

The JVC 1000 looked really good and hopefully will be that much better when the production units come out.

I don't recall seeing any " vibrating " on the image. There was moire on the Moracco brass vender stall scene, but I'd bet that's in the video. Did you have your face up against the screen ? If it's related to the 8K eshift, just turn it off I say.

[AVSCraig]

What about the Wolf PRO-817 laser driven DLP using the XPR chip? It's received some very good notice elsewhere. $10k.

I see rainbows on all the single chip DLP's out these days. So for me they are a no go.

[ericglo]

I've contemplated about going to CEDIA a few times, but my impression is that you never really get a good look at anything while you're there. Plus, the nature of pre-production units makes it difficult to really judge performance. I live vicariously through you guys during CEDIA each year.

Good to hear about the HiSense model. I hope I can see one at some point. You're not the first person who I've heard that from with this model.

Darin told me that if the show had been in Seattle that he probably wouldn't have stayed more than a couple of hours. Remember he isn't into audio. I did most of what I wanted to see in two days or less. Really like Haflich once said, I go to see the people and hang out with like minded folks. Remember Kossman's Crt meet.

As for the Hisense, some guy named Nigel thought the colors looked good. I believe Mike thought it was interesting as well. I don't recall what Darin thought.

Arrow did expand on his thoughts and is correct. If this pj could significantly bring up the contrast, then it would be something.


I did ask about a regular front pj. One guy said no plans. They must think there is a big market in these UST pjs with screen and audio. I still think it is to expensive, but what do I know.  I think they are tacking on the retail price of a Black Diamond screen even though this is their own screen.

Hisense is located in Johns Creek. No surprise as my sister says it has become very Asian. Next time I am in Atlanta, I will try to stop in.

I forgot to add that Mike said Calman is included with IIRC the top model. All you need is a probe.

[ericglo]

What about the Wolf PRO-817 laser driven DLP using the XPR chip? It's received some very good notice elsewhere. $10k.

As Dylan said, it is an Optoma with their "own special sauce". Seymour had it in his booth. It looked pretty good, but not $10k plus good. The Wolf guy was proud of his pj, but I am not sure who would buy this.

[ericglo]

I don't recall seeing any " vibrating " on the image. There was moire on the Moracco brass vender stall scene, but I'd bet that's in the video. Did you have your face up against the screen ? If it's related to the 8K eshift, just turn it off I say.

Nope, I saw it multiple times. I only mention it and wouldn't knock the pj for it yet. Someone else told me the same at the Samsung party.

If it is eshift related, then yes I would turn off the eshift. My guess is it won't be there on production units. I am sure Kris and Nigel will put it through the wringer.

[Dylan Seeger]

Darin told me that if the show had been in Seattle that he probably wouldn't have stayed more than a couple of hours. Remember he isn't into audio. I did most of what I wanted to see in two days or less. Really like Haflich once said, I go to see the people and hang out with like minded folks. Remember Kossman's Crt meet.

As for the Hisense, some guy named Nigel thought the colors looked good. I believe Mike thought it was interesting as well. I don't recall what Darin thought.

Arrow did expand on his thoughts and is correct. If this pj could significantly bring up the contrast, then it would be something.


I did ask about a regular front pj. One guy said no plans. They must think there is a big market in these UST pjs with screen and audio. I still think it is to expensive, but what do I know.  I think they are tacking on the retail price of a Black Diamond screen even though this is their own screen.

Hisense is located in Johns Creek. No surprise as my sister says it has become very Asian. Next time I am in Atlanta, I will try to stop in.

I forgot to add that Mike said Calman is included with IIRC the top model. All you need is a probe.

If it were in Seattle, I'd probably make the trip out and ask Kris if we could do a little theater meet at his place. I think we'd all have a good time, plus I'd love to finally meet Kris and some of the other guys. I had a great time at the CRT meet. I was surprised Mark Seaton showed up (as it was primarily a projector meet). He's a real class act who knows his stuff. I suppose he was there to tweak the audio system he installed and wow was it impressive! I remember listening to the 5.1 SACD mix of Tumbleweed Connection and my jaw dropped.

[AVSCraig]

Most of us that go to Cedia are there on business. I spent 24 full hours over 3 days on the floor and still didn't visit everyone or see everything I wanted too. It's different if you are an enthusiast. If I didn't work in the industry, I'd only go if I was planning on spending big bucks on something myself. 

[AVSMike]

Most of us that go to Cedia are there on business. I spent 24 full hours over 3 days on the floor and still didn't visit everyone or see everything I wanted too. It's different if you are an enthusiast. If I didn't work in the industry, I'd only go if I was planning on spending big bucks on something myself.

Yep, with all of our meetings, I did not get to see a few things that I wanted to. I ran out of time and did not get into the IMAX demo.

[Dylan Seeger]

Ekki over at cine4home seems to be doing well now and is back in full swing reviewing projectors. His first look at a series of 295ES and 695ES units from Sony shows incremental improvements. The full write up can be found here. The 295ES averaged among units tested; 1300 max calibrated lumens, 13000:1 minimum native contrast (more achievable with less zoom, but at the cost of lumen output), ANSI contrast of 420:1 and input lag with a UHD source of only 27ms. These numbers are pretty close to last years models. Ekki does note that quality control for things like lens focus uniformity, focus strength and convergence seem to be a step up from previous years based on what he saw with the batch of units he received.

However, the same issues that have plagued Sony 4K projectors are still present. Banding from the software convergence software and posterization due to issues feeding the SXRD panels information properly. The former he claims cannot be seen with real content. I disagree as I've seen this artifact with real content before. Users are forced to go into the service menu to disable it, which many people are not comfortable doing. The latter he claims is an issue with PWM and while that may be true, JVC and Epson feed their panels information this same way and posterization issues anywhere near this scale are not found with DiLA and LQoS. However, it is nice to see that he has FINALLY mentioned this issue in one of his Sony reviews. This is the first time I've seen him mention it in a review. He says:

But the color resolution of the VW series is still not perfect: The fully digital color generation via pulse width modulation (fast clocking of the pixels) shows losses in some subtle nuances, which leads to "posterization".



The better the starting material, the lower the effects are perceived. While this is undoubtedly "whining at a high level", we set the appropriate standards for the product class.

I find this statement in bold a little ironic. In his N5 (RS1000) first look he mentioned something that is truly insignificant in context and by comparison on JVC projectors. He mentions the issue with dithering noise in dark parts of the image. He actually listed that as a negative in his first look at the N5. The irony is that JVC's issue is apparently a big deal and the Sony's is "whining at a high level". Sony's issue does the image a lot more harm. Sony's issue literally takes away digital resolution any time there is complex color (ie anytime you're playing back video) and JVCs add some fine mosquito noise. What sounds worse? My takeaway is that this posterization issue effectively makes these SXRD projectors fail at being true 4K. If you can't give all your pixels discreet color information how can you call it a native device? It guess I just don't understand why he isn't as upset as I am. It certainly does the picture more harm than ANY of the negative aspects of JVC's DILA projectors. Maybe I've misunderstood or there's been something lost in translation. It just seems to me Ekki is being a little unfair. If he's a member of this forum I hope he can discuss his thoughts on all of this. Though, again, I will give him credit for at least mentioning it in his review.

The 295ES does not offer the RS1000 competition in my opinion. The RS1000 should be several hundred lumens brighter, have an order of magnitude more dynamic contrast available to it, similar (probably better based on what I've seen) lens quality and image sharpness, full color resolution capabilities to accurately display UHD-bluray content which the Sony lacks, similar color gamut capabilities and a similar enough video processing suite.  With the price being so close, I find it hard to find a reason why anyone would choose the Sony over the JVC. You really need to step up to the higher end Sony's for them to start making more sense. The two bottom end units from Sony just don't offer enough performance at the asking price for people to consider buying them. Though I'm sure those less informed walk-ins at the boutique home theater shops or those buying it for the Sony name will help Sony move a lot of units still.

[Peter Parker]

Well, to be fair, the JVC image noise has been there for a long time and I often notice it in demos - it's one of the things that distinguish it from other products when doing split screen comparison (along with contrast and black levels of course). The micro flicker not so much, so I think it's nice to see someone actually mention it in a review. For me it means the overall image appears less stable than some other models so it's not a positive attribute and one that I'd like to see remedied. I think c4h attribute it to the panels being digitally addressed (pwm) rather than analogue and not all projectors are doing it that way so not all pjs have that problem. I would think with the 4k JVC models, the pixels being smaller may mean that it's less visible, depending on your seating distance. I don't know how the 4500 does it, but owners like Craig say they find the image cleaner and more stable than the lamp based units and that is one of the reasons they prefer the image despite the contrast deficit.

No projector is perfect and I don't see a problem with these things being pointed out, after all, the Sony's banding although present in some images is a similar issue that doesn't bother everyone and I think some owners prefer the Sony image to the JVCs despite the reduced contrast. We just have to accept the pros and cons of each and pick our poison.

[Dylan Seeger]

It's not really about whether a projector is perfect or not. It's about the relatively of the issues present. I just found it odd that one gets a pass and the other criticized making it to the negative list at the end of a review.

Interestingly enough the Sony 4K models have non-defeatable noise reduction. What this means is that the image processing can actually take away grain in the image that's supposed to be there. That doesn't happen on the JVCs. What a lot of people assume is dither noise is actually noise in the source and the noise reduction on the Sony makes it appear as if the JVC is noisier. The noise reduction widens the noise gap even if it's supposed to be there and I suspect what most assume is an artifact is actually source related. A lot of the time what people see as an issue with the JVC is actually an issue with the Sony. The dither noise only occurs in dark areas (lower IREs) of the image. So if the noise you or anyone saw in a comparison was in medium to bright content it was supposed to be there and it was actually the Sony with an issue with its picture. This has been confirmed objectively by looking at source still frames on a reference monitor many times in the past.

[Dylan Seeger]

Here's a thought. The next time you demo a JVC, pause the image. Go up to the screen and look for dancing noise. The noise you see is dither or eshift related. Go back to your seat with the image still paused and see if you can see the image noise. I personally cannot see this type of noise from my seated position. The image noise eshift added to the image is much worse than the dither noise IMO, but I can only see if it I'm close to the screen. But now with native 4K panels it's not going to be there anymore. If you also can only see it from your screen you and not at your seat then the other noise you see is source related, not from the projector.

[Peter Parker]

I think most people are well aware of the Sony issues (banding, noise reduction etc which has been there for ages, panel degradation may be fixed though), but I don't think you're doing yourself any favours by referring to Sony owners as 'fanboys' just because that's their preference. It could just as easily be said that you're a JVC fanboy and have bias, especially given your reaction to Ekki's comments. Don't take it so personally.

It's just a question of balance and what people prefer. You clearly don't like the Sony's and prefer the JVCs, whereas others are the other way round, yet that doesn't seem acceptable to you.

The JVC dither noise isn't just in dark areas, and JVC are well aware of the issue because they said that with eshift 5 they have reduced the image noise (part of their marketing blurb), so that's a clear admission that it's a pj artefact (and not a source artefact) that they're trying to remedy that. Ekki was just pointing out that it still seems to be present in the new 4K models and I don't see anything wrong with that, in the same way he's saying the banding is still present in the new Sony models. The JVC image noise is something that doesn't bother you, in the same way that the banding etc of the Sony's doesn't bother other people, but I don't see why the people with a Sony preference should be attacked for it and labelled as fanboys. Both have pros and cons and people are just choosing the image they prefer at the price point they can afford.