JVC DLA-Z1
JVC is no stranger to producing class-leading premium projectors. The company has launched a stream of them over the years, and we’ve used a fair few as reference products over that time. Yet nothing we’ve seen from the company has been as ambitious as the 4K HDR DLA-Z1.
While both those technologies are firmly embedded into the world of televisions, the combination is still a relatively rare thing in the world of proper home cinema. All the 4K projectors we’ve reviewed have been premium devices costing thousands, but even by those hefty standards the JVC is in a different league. It’s a cutting-edge unit at a cutting-edge price.
The Z1 uses three 4096 x 2160 D-ILA panels with a light engine based on JVC’S proprietary Blu-escent laser projection technology. It uses blue laser diodes to offer 3000 lumens brightness and 20,000 hours of operational life – well beyond that of a typical projector. D-ILA is a hybrid of DLP and LCD technology and JVC (along with Sony’s SXRD iteration) has been using it for years.
Just as important as the projector technology is the lens system, and here JVC’S engineers have refused to compromise. The lens assembly is an 18-element affair with a 100mm diameter. It’s designed to reduce colour distortion to a minimum while maintaining transparency. As for HDR,
the Z1 can process the more recent Hybrid Log Gamma, alongside the established HDR10 standard.
This JVC is a beast. It’s about the size of a suitcase and, at 38kg, weighs as much as one lined with lead. But the connections are simple – two HDMI inputs (HDCP 2.2 compliant), an RS-232 port and a RJ45 connection, both for home integration. It’s relatively quiet, rating at 25db even with the fan running.
You might imagine a projector such as this would be difficult to set up, but it isn’t. Provided you can cope with the bulk and put it in a sensible position relative to the screen, the rest is straightforward. Motorised lens shift, zoom and focus make positioning the image a breeze, while the clear menus make optimising easy. Still, we suspect few customers will actually install this beast themselves; at this level, it makes sense to get the selling dealer to do it.
Once up and running, this JVC is an astonishing performer. We dive straight in with the BBC'S brilliant Planet Earth II 4K Blu-ray and love what we see. Bold, richly textured colours collide with the crispest edges and sharpest detail we’ve ever seen from a projector. This disc is beautifully shot and the Z1 is talented enough to show it in its full glory.
It handles the subtleties brilliantly, not only low-level details, such as the texture of a humming bird’s wings or the nuances of a frog’s skin, but in the way it renders small changes in light. We can’t remember seeing a display that gives such an impression of depth on a 2D image – thanks to the superb way it renders changes in shading.
Contrast is rated at an essentially meaningless Infinity:1, but there’s no denying it’s superb, delivering bright and dark elements in a single frame expertly. By all but OLED TV standards, black levels are excellent; they don’t sacrifice much in the way of shadow detail in the darker scenes in the process either.
Moving to standard Blu-ray isn’t the let-down it could have been. The format’s lower innate resolution (compared with 4K) is obvious in the slight blurring of detail and lack of crispness, but the Z1 has a fine internal scaler that still makes the most of things.
Rich colours
We watch Scott Pilgrim vs The World and like the way the projector copes with the rich colour palette, subtle details and fast motion. The image is good enough to transport us into the film, and never jars with shortcomings in format or its resolution. It’s a stable and secure picture, keeping a track of movement without obvious blurring or judder.
If you want 3D, you’ll have to spend extra for the optional glasses and transmitter. But, when you're spending this amount, it may not be hard to get a dealer to chuck them into the deal.
If your viewing habits still take in large amounts of standard definition source material, then the DLA-Z1’S talents are far less obvious. Watching Stoker on DVD, we find it produces a relatively clean and crisp image, with a surprisingly low level of picture noise considering its 4K capability. Colours look convincing while motion is pretty surefooted too.
Overall, there are cheaper Full HD projectors that do as good a job with this format. Standard-definition material will never provide a platform for a top-end projector to show off its talents, but the JVC at least proves its all-round ability.
Let’s imagine for a moment that the £35,000 price tag hanging off the JVC isn’t an issue. What you’re left with is a projector that produces the finest image we’ve seen in our test rooms. Consider us highly tempted indeed.