JVC DLA-RS25 – Projector Screens & Competitors – 1

Posted on October 11, 2013 By Art Feierman

JVC DLA-RS25 vs. Planar PD8150 and Optoma HD8600

Two excellent pricey projectors, but the Planar is strictly a small screen projector. It produces mid-400 lumens in “best” and only about an extra 150 in brightest. As a premium single chip DLP it has a very sharp image that best’s the JVC.

Although the Planar had the best black level performance of any of the DLP projectors, and definitely makes my subjective cut as an “ultra-high contrast” projector, the JVC is still a step up, in terms of black level performance.

Both projectors have extremely good color right out of the box.

The JVC has better placement flexibility with its 2:1 zoom besting the Planar’s 1.3:1, but both have lens shift, and the Planar’s through is a bit longer than most DLP’s so it should rear shelf mount in a lot of peoples rooms.

Although they have a slghtly different look and feel to their image, the planar, with that crisp look to its image, and the rich dark colors that DLPs seem so good at. The JVC, a touch softer, very natural, and brighter, and with those blacker blacks.

If you are doing a small dedicated theater, with, say a 92″ diagonal screen, the Planar will really be in its element. Otherwise, overall, the JVC just overpowers or matches the Planar at most things except sharpness.

When it comes to the Optoma HD8600, I’ve been working with it, as I finish this. I’ll be posting the HD8600 review 2nd week of December (09), so check its competitors section for a comparison with the JVC.

DLA-RS25 vs. InFocus IN83 and SP8602

The new InFocus SP8602 – SP is short for ScreenPlay – has great potential, and ships this month (12/09). Our look at an engineering sample though didn’t go far because we couldn’t calibrate it. Still, from what I saw, it should prove to be a very worthy replacement for the InFocus IN83, but one with far better black level performance.

For most of this, I’ve pasted in the IN83 vs (older) DLA-RS20 competitor section (I’ve searched and replaced RS20 with RS25. from January. This is done for two reasons. First, I did a lot of still relevant side by side photos between the IN83 and the RS20. Since the picture quality of the RS25 is virtually the same as the RS20’s but for some minor improvement (including black levels), these images are close enough:

Very interesting competition here. The IN83 is an excellent DLP projector with Darkchip4. The IN83 I have here still does the best overall color of any of the current 1080p projectors I’ve reviewed, doing our normal calibration. Even with the CMS settings we are using for the RS25 (and we didn’t do anything but grayscale balance, brightness, contrast and gamma, for the IN83), the InFocus still has the advantage in skin tones and overall color. It’s the kind of difference where the RS25 looks great, and everyone is happy, until put side by side with the IN83, then it’s – the RS25 looks great, but the IN83 does better.

That’s only until you hit the first dark scene, and the JVC RS25’s black levels just destroy the IN83’s best on those dark scenes. Black levels aren’t even close, as you can see from these three side by side images. The first is simply a black image (between scenes). Since neither projector uses a dynamic iris, what you see, is what you get. Remember we overexpose these images (to varying degrees) to make the differences easy to see (JVC is on the right side in all of these images):

Click Image to Enlarge

Next is a scene with almost no bright areas, from Men In Black. This is an excellent example of the difference in black level handling between these two. The first pair is more overexposed to show differences, the second is closer to what you will see on your screen:

DLA-RS25