RS2 Projector Screen Recommendations

Posted on December 25, 2007 By Art Feierman

No queston about it. The JVC RS2 pairs beautifully with my Firehawk G3. With my still off white walls, and some ambient light the RS2 handles my afternoon football games reasonably well, too. If you’ve got the right room – dark walls and ceilings, and all lighting is well controlled, though, the black levels are such that you really don’t need a gray surface screen. On my 106″ Carada Brilliant White, the image was eye-popping, although even the RS2’s extremely dark blacks are noticeably less black, due to the smaller screen and the white surface. I think a 110″ – 125″ diagonal screen like the Carada, or the Stewart Studiotek 130 in the right room, has got to make for a spectacular combination.

In other words match the screen to the room. The projector is excellent enough to do great on either type, high contrast gray, or white surface. I wouldn’t use a plus gain white like those two, under 100″ size though. At 100 to 110 inches, if you feel it too bright, drop the lamp into low.

RS2 Projector Measurements and Calibration


White (100 IRE)	6488K
Light gray (80 IRE)	6444K
Medium gray (50 IRE)	6397K
Low gray (30 IRE)	6379K

That’s about as good as it gets, out of the box. A very tight projector, with only only 109K difference between the warmest and coolest settings.

The JVC’s output is slightly cooler (about 200K – 250K higher) when the lamp is in low power mode.

As a side note, I normally leave a projector on, for about 30 minutes before beginning measurements, as I did when I first measured the RS2. A couple days later, I was rechecking some numbers, and was surprised to find that the same setup that generated, the 100IRE numbers above, measured about 300K higher, the second time around. Then I realized that I started the new measurement after the projector was only on about 5 minutes. Sure enough, I left the projector alone for a while, and came back, maybe 25 minutes later, and the numbers were again very close to the first measurements. The moral of the story? The color temperature of this projector (and no doubt every other one), changes a small, but significant amount over the first 30 minutes. (It likely continues to change, but only slightly). To verify that, I remeasured again, after about another 15 minutes, and the color temperature only shifted by about 20-30K.

accuracy for movie watching


White (100 IRE)	6530K
Light gray (80 IRE)	6554K
Medium gray (50 IRE)	6609K
Low gray (30 IRE)	6444K

Green was virtually dead on at all IREs.

Please note, with the settings above, the projector dropped down about 20 lumens, compared to the low color temp setting, but other variations could just as easily boost lumens slightly.