JVC Projector Comparison & Review | DLA-NX5, DLA-NX7, DLA-NX9

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It’s been over 20 years since the D-ILA or “Digital Direct Drive Image Light Amplifier” that JVC developed was introduced. D-ILA has evolved over the years and now JVC produces D-ILA chips that are 4K-capable. Their unique liquid-crystal-layer packs almost 9 million pixels into a panel that is .69” square. The NX9, NX7, and NX5 all use this same liquid-crystal on a silicon display with 3 chips — one red, one blue, and one green — to produce the full-color spectrum. D-ILA technology offers great contrast, high brightness, and very natural colors. All three of the models also use the same high-output lamp to drive the display. All of them are true 4K-capable with HDCP 2.2 tech to handle the highest bandwidth 4K signals.

At Audio Advice, most of our home-theater customers opt for the wider-screen these days. To enjoy widescreen, you obviously need a 2.35 or 2.40 screen, but you also need a projector capable of lens-memories, so you can set up the projector to fill the screen left to right when you watch a widescreen movie. Every one of these three models has this feature, which we really love for enjoying widescreen. JVC actually takes the lens memories to the extreme. There are multiple presets you can use, which means you can also have one for all the ones we’re seeing on Netflix, which is the ratio of 2.1 — not quite as wide as 2.35, but this is wider than 16:9. Should you want to get into the best of widescreen, all three models are designed to work with the aftermarket Panamorph lens for an even better widescreen picture.

If you follow home-theater and are one of those people like us who are always looking for the very best picture-quality, you have probably run across the term HDR or “high dynamic range.” This technology was developed to allow for more color-variations, brighter brights, and deeper blacks to give us an image that is even closer to real-life. There is metadata in the video-feed that tells the display-device how to handle this new, higher-resolution signal. You would think this would all be great news for home-theater enthusiasts like us — but when HDR first came out, it had the opposite effect. You see, HDR is designed for displays that can deliver a ton of light output, in the range of 1000 to 4000 Nits. In case you were wondering, a “Nit” is the light-output of one candle. Almost all of the better flat-panel TVs can easily reproduce this level of brightness, but unfortunately, most home-theater projectors can only deliver around 100-200 Nits. When we saw our first HDR image on a front-projector, it just looked super dark. This immediately led the projector manufacturers to come up with software that talked to the projector to better handle the HDR-feed and also give us a much better image. JVC has developed what they call “Auto Tone Mapping.” This system does an outstanding job of delivering HDR content the way it was intended — and JVC has been providing free updates as they improve it. One of the keys to getting the best HDR experience is knowing how much light-output is coming off your screen. For the average person, this is not easy to measure — so in JVC’s latest update, they allow you to input your screen-size and screen-gain. You can even do this for each memory so you can set it up differently for 16 by 9 and widescreen modes. The system even accounts for lamp-life and how much the image is zoomed.

Build quality on these is also top-notch. With their all-glass lens and professional construction, I have to say they are not lightweight at all. The NX5 and NX7 are over 43-pounds and the NX9 is even heavier. If you are doing a “Do It Yourself” installation, be sure, and have someone available to help! And for those of you who’ll be installing one of these yourself, you’ll appreciate the fact that all three have a wide-range of lens-shift, which means you don’t have to worry about getting it centered on your screen down to a half-inch. All of the adjustments on these models are electronic, which allows you to do the fine-tuning much easier than a manually adjusted projector. Finally, like most projection companies, JVC has tech to reduce motion-artifacts and there is a special low-latency mode you can use for gaming.