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Home Theater Geeks 480: The Screening Room 2025 Projector Shootout Part 2
00:48:10
Calibration results & takeaways!
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- [00:00]
Scott Wilkinson
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I continue my conversation with several members of the Screening Room, a website in Colorado that put on the 2025 projector shootout. So stay tuned.
- [00:16]
Chris Deering
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:20]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
This is tw.
- [00:32]
Scott Wilkinson
Hey there. Scott Wilkinson here, the home theater geek. In this episode, I continue my conversation with several members of the Screening Room, an online retailer that put on a projector shootout last month, April 5th and 6th to be exact, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And we're going to talk this time about the results and the takeaways from from this two day event. Let me re welcome our guests, John Schuerman, who is the owner of the screening room, av. Hey John, welcome back.
- [01:10]
John Schuerman
Thanks, Scott. I'm excited to get on to the results here, which is great to hear. Right.
- [01:16]
Scott Wilkinson
Also from the screening room is Steve Crab, a system designer and a sales and marketing guy. Hey Steve, welcome back.
- [01:24]
Steve Crab
Hey Scott, thanks for having us.
- [01:26]
Scott Wilkinson
Nice to be here. Two of the calibrators involved in the experience, Chris Deering, owner of Deep Dive AV and a professional calibrator of many years. Hey Chris, welcome back.
- [01:39]
Chris Deering
Thanks. It's been a long time.
- [01:41]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, a whole week. And finally we have Sammy Prescott Jr. A an ISF Level 3 calibrator himself with some 15 years or more of experience and a reviewer of projectors@projector central.com Sammy, welcome back.
- [02:02]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
- [02:04]
Scott Wilkinson
You bet. Happy to have you guys here. We're having a great discussion about the projector shootout that you guys did just a few weeks ago. Now, in part one, we discussed the setup and the process of evaluating seven projectors. Actually five projectors. Two of there were seven, but two of them were in a different room. Let's, let's look at the list again just so that we can remind ourselves of what the projectors were. There were five in the main room and that were actually being evaluated. And you can see them there. Sony JV2, JVCs and Epson, and one from this company, Valerian. And they were shown on two different screens, mostly sequentially, that is one and then the other. And we talked a lot about why that was instead of showing them side by side. So if you want to know more about that, be sure to go back and watch part one of this of this episode because that was a really interesting discussion about normally in a shootout you would show them side by side, but these guys decided not to. And for good reason. I'd say they were all shown on the same screen. Stuart Studio Tech 100, 140 inch 16x9. And in a separate room, as you can see in this list, two really high brightness Epsons, the QL7000 and 3000. Mostly the 7000 I believe, because it's 10,000 lumens, which is a light cannon. Seriously, that was shown on 180 inch screen. And they were all, they were shown in a different room. Not really evaluated, just shown. Hey, here's what we can do with a, with a ton of light. And all were calibrated and fed the same content. And we showed these two pictures last time. I'll just show them again of Chris and Sammy doing the calibrations of the main room projectors. And so here we can see, I guess Chris, you did the calibrations while Sammy you operated the projectors, right?
- [04:18]
Chris Deering
No, it was definitely a collaborative effort.
- [04:21]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, okay.
- [04:22]
Chris Deering
Sammy. Sammy got started with the calibrations because he lives in the Colorado Springs area. So they were started calibration on those screens in the warehouse area. And then when we moved into the actual event space, Sammy and I spent an entire day basically going through each one of them all over again, making sure they were as, as well matched as possible and that we were using every tool available to us that we knew of to show each one at its absolute best. The last time we did this event, I did all the calibrations and it was, I, I can't speak enough about Sammy and his level of knowledge. He's been great to collaborate with on this. And I also think that it, it just adds a little bit more to the event to know that two people that are, you know, you know, calibrators are familiar with these things are working together to ensure that like nobody's trying to skew one thing or another. You know, we both went out of our way to try to make them look as best as they possibly could for the event.
- [05:22]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah. Sammy, in your pre calibrations, did you, you, I assume you use the same screen?
- [05:29]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Yes. Yeah. So all these screens were in the screening rooms warehouse. And basically we set them up there and went through, calibrated them and then we just moved them to a new location. And it worked out well because me and Chris, we do a lot of the same things. Like it's kind of interesting, like we do a lot of the same things, but then there's certain things where it's like, I might do it a little bit differently or he does a little bit differently. So we bounce off of each other back and forth to figure out, okay, well I do it this way, you do it that way. And then sometimes we would be sitting there taking measurements and we're like, okay, we're going to split the difference. We're going to do it this way or we're going to use this picture mode. So it worked really well. And it's kind of scary that we both do a lot of the same stuff.
- [06:17]
John Schuerman
Like, that's a good thing.
- [06:19]
Scott Wilkinson
Calibration, to me. Well, it's. There is a science to it, but there's also an art to it. I mean, the science is you're trying to hit certain very specific, very well defined targets in terms of color and light output and so on and so forth. And yet there. I'm sure there's some art to it. I know there is. On how to get there.
- [06:45]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Yeah, there's. There's a lot of different paths that you could take. And luckily, between his experience and my experience, I think we did pretty good.
- [06:53]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, I'm sure of that. I have no idea. Have every, every faith that you did. Now, as a matter of fact, let's take a look at some of the calibration results that's in graphic four. And we can see when we see that. There it is.
- [07:12]
John Schuerman
Scott.
- [07:13]
Scott Wilkinson
Yes?
- [07:14]
John Schuerman
Interject something real quick Just, just to clarify something.
- [07:17]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, sure.
- [07:18]
Chris Deering
Sorry.
- [07:18]
John Schuerman
This is kind of totally related, but I just want to make sure it was clear the screen room. We're not an online retailer in terms of like a shopping cart type site. We're more of a consultative entity. And so I just wanted to make sure people didn't think we were like a shopping cart type thing.
- [07:32]
Scott Wilkinson
Oh, okay. No, that's a great clarification. I really appreciate it.
- [07:36]
John Schuerman
And then our other thing is that we do these type of shootouts with speakers and all these different products and whatever wins, and me being the owner of the company, whatever wins the shootouts goes in my house and that becomes our showroom. And often we have people fly in to see what's won all these shootouts. Sonny, that's. That's. I'll. That's the extent of it. And then I'll shut up and we'll.
- [07:52]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay, well, I will, though. I will say that in some cases the shootout has a clear winner. Like in the, in the case of some speaker shootouts you've done, you have ranked them, you've graded them with numbers like ice skating or anything else that. That gets graded and you have a winner. In this case, you didn't because you knew that. That certain projectors would be good for certain things and other projectors be Good. For other things, it depends on what the customer. What the goals are to.
- [08:23]
John Schuerman
Exactly.
- [08:24]
Scott Wilkinson
That really helps you determine which. What's the best projector for them, Right?
- [08:29]
John Schuerman
Precisely. Yeah, that was the. That was the goal this time around.
- [08:32]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah.
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John Schuerman
Because there is so much of that online of this week. You know, this. This projector blows away this one. Whatever. Well, it depends on what you're going to do with it.
- [08:40]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah.
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John Schuerman
And we try to give that context.
- [08:42]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay. But we want to make clear that the Screening Room is not a shopping cart site.
- [08:47]
John Schuerman
Yeah.
- [08:48]
Scott Wilkinson
And when I call, when I say it's an online retailer, that may be a bit of a misnomer, and I apologize.
- [08:53]
John Schuerman
Oh, no problem. We're kind of an odd animal and a lot. It confuses a lot of people and confuses the manufacturers that we work with and even their reps sometimes. So I'll shut up about that. I just want to make sure.
- [09:03]
Scott Wilkinson
Okay.
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John Schuerman
All right.
- [09:04]
Scott Wilkinson
All right. But you do offer a lot of consulting services as well to help customers choose the best thing for their environment, right? Yeah. Okay. All right, now let's go take a look at the calibration results. And we can see here that what we're looking at, what you have measured or what we're showing here anyway, is the standard dynamic range SDR contrast ratio and the SDR calibrated nits. That is the amount of light coming off the screen and then the high dynamic range HDR contrast ratio and the HDR calibrated nits. And I put the MSRP there as well just to remind us how much each of these projectors costs. So Sammy and Chris give us a little rundown on what these numbers mean and what's the significance.
- [10:02]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
So the contrast ratio is basically sequential. So it's your on off. So it's your measure peak white against effectively black. Or what is the projectors capable of in terms of black. So that is what the contrast ratio is obviously for SDR. SDR content is mastered at 1000 or not a thousand 100 nits. Like, it's not really supposed to be any brighter. So we tried to get the SDR to be on the target of 100 nits or as close to it as possible.
- [10:31]
Scott Wilkinson
And you got really close.
- [10:33]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Yeah, we got really close. And the thing is, is that when you look at luminance, luminance is logarithmic. You're not going to notice the difference between 102 nits and 106. Like, you can't really see that. And then we basically just let them run at full brightness for whatever they're capable of for hdr. Obviously when you do that, because with projection, as you generally turn up the light, it's going to turn up black as well. Right, because you can't make black out of nothing. So in most cases, what you're going to end up getting is a slightly lower contrast ratio, which you'll see with like the 900, 100 for instance. But some of them are going to remain very similar like you see with the Valerian. So that's what we are really trying to target. Just let them do whatever they can do for HDR and then target 100 nits for SDR.
- [11:30]
Scott Wilkinson
Why is it, Chris, that the JVCs have such greater contrast ratio than any of the others?
- [11:42]
Chris Deering
JVCs, you know, they're, they're known for what's called the LCOS chips. So liquid crystal and silicone, or dila is what we, they typically refer to it as. And they use proprietary wire grid polarizers to basically block more light coming through. Because again, it does go through almost like an LCD panel and then is reflected back.
- [12:06]
Scott Wilkinson
And so the light, the light actually goes through the LCD panel twice.
- [12:10]
Chris Deering
Correct.
- [12:10]
Scott Wilkinson
Comes in, gets reflected off the back, the mirror in the back plane, and then back out through the LCD panel. Again, as you mentioned last, in the last episode, they are rated at roughly 50% efficiency. That is, they lose 50% of the light that comes in by the time it gets back out.
- [12:28]
Chris Deering
Absolutely. So, you know, basically to create a lower black floor in a projection system, in a projector, you have to have a way to essentially trap that light. You know, so something has to be blocking it from coming in. Dlp, you know, the, the mirrors tilt and it, it reflects light into what's called like a black area. I can't remember the technical term for it. And that can only absorb so much of that light. You know, that's still scattering inside jvc, Epson and Sony are all using technology where the panel itself is doing different things to try to block that light. And in the case of the J, you know, they have some proprietary things that they do that just happen to do the best job in terms of blocking that light to get their black floor as low as possible to give it the most overall dynamic range of the, of the groups.
- [13:27]
Scott Wilkinson
The Sony got pretty good in. In HDR, it was at like 10,000 to 1, SDR 9,431 to 1. So not that much different.
- [13:38]
Chris Deering
Yeah, so the Sony there. So again, we kind of talk about these numbers because that, so Projectors only have certain ways to increase their overall dynamic range. Like Sammy said, the sequential. So basically the full dynamic range that it's capable of. The lowest black, the highest white. So in the case of the Valerian, the Epson and the Sony, the only thing that they have to do that is the imaging chip itself, whether that's the DLP chip, the LCD chip or the SXRD chip, they're not using any kind of iris or anything. Now they all have dynamic modulating systems that can help increase their contrast ratio subjectively. Again, there's always trade offs in that you're, you're usually giving up one thing to get the other. But they don't have any mechanical. The JVCs, both the NZ500 and the NZ900 have apertures or irises. However you want to put it. The NZ500 has a single aperture, the NZ900 has a dual aperture. So if you look at the NZ 900 numbers, because we have a lot of light headroom, like light output headroom, trying to get to the SDR at 100 nits, we could use some of that extra light and clamp down the irises. And as you can see, that ended up with a contrast ratio there of almost 34,000 to 1. But when we ran SDR in SDR because we had headroom in the light engine to close those apertures down and increase the overall dynamic range. But when we did the hdr, we wanted these to be running basically at full brightness. And if we do that, we're not using any apertures or anything like that. So you are just getting raw output which was closer to 19,000 to 1 with this specific one.
- [15:32]
Scott Wilkinson
Right. So it actually lowered the contrast ratio in both JVC cases.
- [15:38]
Chris Deering
Correct.
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Sammy Prescott Jr.
Right. And you also have to factor in the room. A room plays a huge part in this. So like if you have a black four in your room of say 0.002 and you can get it pretty bright and keep the black 4 low, then your contrast is going to effectively look like. Looks like it increases. So the room does play a huge part in this as well because like I said, you would have contamination from the back wall splashing back to the screen. So the contrast technically could be greater depending on where this is placed.
- [16:13]
Scott Wilkinson
This actually reminds me of an analogous situation in audio where you want to know the noise floor of the room you're listening in. And the lower the noise floor, the greater the dynamic range of audio that you can reproduce.
- [16:30]
John Schuerman
That's almost a perfect analogy.
- [16:32]
Chris Deering
Yeah, yeah, it works. It Works slightly different with projection because it's a reflected technology. So if you think of the full sequential contrast. So if I'm talking about a full white screen versus a full black screen, the room actually plays no part in it because you're not. You're all the light going out is the same going back to it for the white, and then for the black, there is no light going back to the screen other than what is out. So a room has no effect on a sequential contrast unless there's a light source other than the projector reflecting onto the screen.
- [17:08]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure.
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Chris Deering
Now, what happens in a room like what we were in is your mixed contrast changes. So as you have mixed images, the. The more white, like, say, like the room behind me, all of that light is going back to the screen and washing out that image and basically taking your floor up higher and higher, the brighter the image goes. So it definitely has a big effect on the mixed contrast of images. When you have a room that. That does that. Again, assuming there's no other light source, we're just talking about light reflected from the screen back onto itself from the.
- [17:44]
Scott Wilkinson
The walls like that. Whatever. Yeah. Did you guys do ANSI contrast measurements? That's when you put up a checkerboard of white and black, and I guess it's got 12 or 16 squares alternating white and black. And you take measurements from each of those. Did you do that?
- [18:02]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
No, we didn't do any ANSI measurements on this.
- [18:06]
Chris Deering
The antsy contrast measurement is a little misunderstood because it only represents one mixed contrast number, which is a 50 APL.
- [18:14]
Scott Wilkinson
Yes.
- [18:15]
Chris Deering
Which is representative of pretty much nothing you're ever going to watch.
- [18:20]
Scott Wilkinson
By the way, APL's average picture level for those who don't know the term.
- [18:24]
Chris Deering
Yeah. So the average picture level of most content, you know, and this is stuff that there's been lots of tests on. This is roughly around 8 to 10%. So if you're. If you're taking a measurement at 50%, you know, it's. It just really doesn't play into it that well. Now, we could have definitely done mixed contrast levels through there, but I feel like that's something that's more in line with doing a review like Sammy doing something for, like projector central or something like that, where people can do that, because you really want to do that. Like you would do a speaker measurement where it's almost anechoic, you know, right off the lens. The contrast measurements that you're seeing in those charts are just basically what we measured off the screen as we were doing the calibration, sure. So it's. It's representative of what the dynamic range was of the display that we were looking at in terms of its overall capability.
- [19:14]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Natively. None of this was using dynamic.
- [19:17]
Scott Wilkinson
None of this is using dynamic contrast, Correct, Right, yeah.
- [19:20]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
This is just their native performance.
- [19:22]
Scott Wilkinson
Right, right.
- [19:23]
Chris Deering
In the event itself, we had the dynamic functions of all of them on to give them the best chance of looking, you know, again, what we thought was subjectively the best performance that any one of them could do dynamically. So the jvc, the Sony, the Epson, all of them had some kind of dynamic contrast system on. And again, we picked the mode that we did based. Based on our experience with them and what we felt gave the best results.
- [19:50]
Scott Wilkinson
I've sometimes experienced dynamic contrast in projectors as being noticeable, being visible, having some sort of pumping effect.
- [20:00]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Did you notice any of that with one of them? I would say for the most part, we did. That was probably the Epson, specifically with the scene in Oblivion. It might have happened with another. Actually, no. It also happened with one of the Zero Dark Thirty scenes with the Epson, but outside of that, it didn't really pop up too much.
- [20:25]
John Schuerman
Yeah, it was one of those things, like for a frame or something, it would just, all of a sudden you saw it do something. And I don't know if the average attendee noticed that, but, I mean, all of us are trained to look at this stuff.
- [20:35]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure, sure, sure. Exactly.
- [20:37]
Chris Deering
And we. And we made it a point during these, like, during each one of those show, point that out. Because again, like, I might see it immediately and be like, oh, that looks bad, but the other people there might not notice it. And. And again, the event is labeled as a shootout. I. I feel like, you know, it's like, yeah, that. That's kind of a buzzword, but it really wasn't meant to be a shootout. I mean, the people that benefited the most from this event, honestly, were the people that attended, the people that came there to, you know, maybe these are projectors that they're thinking about buying themselves. It gives them a chance to see them at their compare. Do I really need to spend this much money or whatever, you know, and. And get educated at the same time. But a lot of these things, it's like, yeah, we could have picked out stuff to kind of showcase, like, how bad this is going to make this feature look. And that. That wasn't the point of it. Yeah, we just wanted to show a broad range of content with the dynamic controls. And if you noticed them, you know, you noticed Them. But if the guy next to you didn't notice them, there's no point in me pointing out issues because then you're just looking for them specifically.
- [21:45]
Scott Wilkinson
Yep, yep. I agree completely. And once you point it out, then you can't unsee it. You'll see it everywhere.
- [21:52]
John Schuerman
Yeah. Perfect example. That would be DLP rain. DLP rainbows. We didn't.
- [21:56]
Scott Wilkinson
Rainbows. Exactly what I was thinking.
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John Schuerman
Yeah. So we just didn't say anything. In fact, it was very, very, very quiet in the room for most of the time because we very deliberately did not want to skew people with our own thoughts and perceptions.
- [22:09]
Scott Wilkinson
Good, good.
- [22:11]
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- [22:41]
Scott Wilkinson
Well, I'm going to throw it open to everybody to just talk about what the takeaways were, what the results were. What did you guys think at the end of it all in terms of how each of these projectors did in a variety of circumstances? John, let's start with you.
- [23:00]
John Schuerman
Yeah.
- [23:01]
Chris Deering
I.
- [23:01]
John Schuerman
The write up should be live. Steve. Steve. And I've been sweating over that thing for the last couple of days trying to get it up. And it is live.
- [23:09]
Scott Wilkinson
And I'm sure we'll put it in the show notes so people can just.
- [23:12]
John Schuerman
Yeah. So I wrote the basic draft of that and then had Chris and Sammy and Steve all take a look at it. Say you guys concur generally with what I'm saying. And I would say that. Well, so that's so far what they told me. When we'll see. Maybe we'll. We've had very little time to actually connect since the event because we've all got back to our lives.
- [23:30]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [23:30]
John Schuerman
So it'd be interesting to hear differences in perception. So I'll share my thoughts overall.
- [23:34]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure.
- [23:35]
John Schuerman
Back in 2000 or back in 2022. I would almost call it a route where the JVC just dominated at single price category because of those contrast numbers. Other than very, very bright content. The JVCs, the darker the image got, the better they looked. We saw that gap close considerably, especially in terms of HDR tone. Mapping Epson and Sony I think have made tremendous strides in bringing that up because what was happening in the previous shootout is not only would the, the lack of contrast become evident, also it was how they were handling color and other elements of the picture. And the picture started looking really flat and washed out and almost drained of color, almost desaturated. That problem was pretty much gone this time. The Epsons of the Sony's and the Valerian all look pretty decent with dark material in terms of color saturation and stuff like that. However, again, it was the same thing in terms of the darker the image got, the better the JVCs looked. And when you put up something like Zero Dark Thirty or the darker scene in Oblivion, it was, you know, it was pretty obvious that the JVC was superior to any of the other projectors. The Sony I thought looked quite good. The 8100 up against the high end JVC again mainly due improvements in tone mapping. And of course you saw it had two to three to four times better contrast than the Epson and the Valerian, Right?
- [25:07]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, exactly. We're looking at that again now.
- [25:09]
John Schuerman
Yeah. So looking at that I'm just like. That kind of reflected very much what. And I only put these numbers in the chart as you know, Scott, I only sent them to you the other day. It's the first time I had a chance to look at them. So I wasn't biased by knowing what the contrast measurement numbers were. But I would say that's a pretty accurate reflection in terms of bright content and sharpness. They all looked really good. I can't fault Epson for their pixel shifting stuff. It looked really sharp and clear. I didn't get right on top of it like I did last time because, you know, we're all sentenced back from what would probably most people consider a standard viewing distance. But so, you know, I personally, I still like the JVCs at the, at the various price points. Especially that 1200 NZ 500 at the price point is just stupid good. And Valerian was interesting. I mean for something, you know, three thousand dollar projector you can take in any room or whatever. I mean it didn't have a bad picture. It looked like dlp like the DLP images that I've seen in the.
- [26:09]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure.
- [26:09]
John Schuerman
I personally didn't see the rainbow effect though we did have a fair number of people, you can see it in the viewer comments complaining about RBE rainbow effect. I didn't personally see it and I used to be pretty rainbow sensitive, but it's been so long since I've seen a dlp, but overall all of them really threw good images. And as you get darker, the JVC and the Sony JVCs and the Sony started pulling ahead, I would say. And I don't know if that was kind of what's in my general report, and I think everybody here generally agrees with that. I'd be curious to know where people differ.
- [26:42]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure. Steve, how about you?
- [26:46]
Steve Crab
Yeah, I mean, okay, so, you know, I was kind of concerned with helping run the event, so I was probably paying as much as I usually would.
- [26:54]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, I get that.
- [26:54]
John Schuerman
Yeah.
- [26:55]
Steve Crab
But I'm an old photography nerd. You know, black and white in color, printing on paper and shooting slides and projecting slides and so. And then when I first got into home theater, this is how old I am. It was CRT projection. And I loved the on off contrast or the sequential contrast that Chris was talking about in CRT projectors because their blacks are. They can make a black so black you can't see your hand in front of your face. And so I've always kind of been drawn to JVC for that reason. But this is probably the first generation of Sony's that I think looks really good and I would probably be okay with even having in my own room. And probably the biggest takeaway for me looking at the whole group was there wasn't a bad projector there. They all looked really good. And if you get into splitting hairs, you can say, oh, this looked really good here and this looked really good here. But all the projectors looked really good. And I think most people would be proud to have them in their room. As a designer and as a consultant working with people, I have a really great group of tools that I can choose from now. So depending on how big somebody's screen is or the size of the room or how much light control they have or don't have, I can really pick a screen and a projector and give somebody a really great projection experience. And I just have to say, personally, as a big fan of projection, it was fun to see these projectors look as good as they do because we've all seen the hyperbole. Oh, the big TVs are right around the corner and they're getting so much cheaper and projectors are going away. And honestly, you know, from having conversations with the group and some of the attendees, I don't think projectors are going anywhere anytime soon. And unless you've sat in a theater and watched a 140, 150, 160 inch image at home and had that Real cinematic experience projectors aren't going anywhere.
- [28:57]
John Schuerman
Yeah. And if I could just kind of piggyback a little bit of what Steve said, just again, when trying to contextualize, I'm talking about the JVC in terms of in a really well designed room where we have good light control. Because as Chris was talking about before and Sam, you were both talking about the black floor is important if you have a lot of ambient light, you have lights on the room and you want to watch with lights on the room or you want to do like the application Epson was doing or you want to do gaming. JVC isn't particularly good at lag. They have some lag issues for gaming. So the Epson and the Valerian and the Sony did better in those regards. So so much of this is application based and then the JVC, that NZ500 tremendous projector for the money, but we were pushing it kind of to its limit at 140 inch screen. You want to go bigger, you need to be looking at one of the brighter projectors either from JVC or one of the other manufacturers.
- [29:47]
Scott Wilkinson
Sammy, how about you?
- [29:49]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Yeah, I would agree there really wasn't what I consider a bad projector. Most projectors nowadays are really actually pretty good. There's a few that you might find that you really have to look for that you consider would be like, okay, that's not great, but all of these are actually really good and it really is going to depend on your use case. So if you are a gamer then you would probably look at the Valerian, the Epson or the Sony. If you really value like high dynamic range and contrast, you would probably look at a jvc. All of the projectors have generally improved over the course of the last few iterations. Where before Sony's tone mapping needed help, but now it was pretty spot on to the point where they did a really great job with their tone mapping. The Epson does a really good job with their tone mapping as well. So it's really hard to get a bad projector. Again, it's going to depend on what's most important to you. So if you want super wide gamut coverage, you might look at the variant because it does 100 or like 98 of BT 2020 where the other ones cannot even you can get to full P3 with the JVC with the filter, but at the cost of light. If you decided not to, you know, take that hit, then your next best choice is going to be the Sony. I think overall though, as good as they are, they could all be better. Like they can all stand to improve.
- [31:32]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure.
- [31:32]
John Schuerman
Right.
- [31:33]
Scott Wilkinson
So that, and thus, thus cometh next year.
- [31:37]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Yeah.
- [31:38]
Scott Wilkinson
I just want to say, explain to people who might not understand this term tone mapping. When you have an HDR high dynamic range signal, it was probably mastered at a peak brightness higher than these projectors can achieve. Most TVs as well, some, some can, but in that case, the projector needs to roll off the peak brightnesses of an HDR image so that it doesn't clip the whites in that image. And how they do that, how they do the roll off is called tone mapping. And some people do, some manufacturers do it differently than others and some are more effective than others. Some people like a certain approach than another approach. So that's another thing to take into account. There's a lot of stuff to take into account here, isn't there, Chris?
- [32:28]
Chris Deering
Absolutely. I think before, you know, you had asked me in the beginning, in the previous episode where you talked about, you saw me kind of talking to the crowd, I mentioned a lot of what's already been said by John and Sammy and Steve is that it's actually hard nowadays to find, harder to find, in my opinion, a bad projector than a good projector. They all kind of have their, their strengths and their weaknesses and at this kind of price point, you know, the, the differences between them start to, to actually get pretty small. You're, you're really looking at buying the right tool for the job. You know, whether that's your budget, whether that's the amount of light you need because of the screen that you have, or the ambient light you're competing with, or it's a, you know, a specific thing like, oh, I, I need something for gaming and I absolutely need the lowest lag. Okay, that, that, that eliminates some stuff or I, I really want to have, you know, like an OLED like experience in my room. So, you know, that, that takes away, you know, a couple of them and only leaves a few. This, this year, you know, having done this the last time and having a lot of these brands there, other than obviously the Valerian, I thought they all looked great. I thought the Epson was probably the most surprising of the bunch. To me, this is their new four way shifting, you know, 4K projector and it was the brightest out of the group. The resolution on it looked great. The image looked nice and sharp. They did really good with the hdr. I mean, really the only time that I thought that, you know, it didn't kind of stack up to some of the other Ones was in the darkest content. But even there, you know, it did along the lines of what I would expect it to do for that. But in every other category, I thought that they made some really nice strides compared to last time. The Sony looked really good. As Sammy said, they've made some really nice improvements in HDR tone mapping, where that just really wasn't an issue. This time I thought that when we compared the. The flagship Sony to the flagship jvc, really the only area that I really felt like they kind of separated from each other. One, the Sony actually did a little bit better with a really bright white scene that we used in some of its hdr, which surprised, I think, a lot of people there. And then the JVC pulled ahead with like the. The darkest material, you know, and stuff, and kind of like as you got towards the bottom and stuff. But outside of that, they largely looked more similar than dissimilar. The Valerian was. The Valerian is the only one that I'm going to reserve judgment on. Valerian had sent us some software to load at their request for this event. And the first day that we did the. The testing, it looked a certain way. There were things that I thought looked good about it. There was other things that I didn't think looked good about it. Sammy had had experience with it before from a review, and he said, you know, the areas that I thought it was weak at, he thought looked better before this firmware that we loaded. But then the second day, they did some things to try to get it more in line with what it was before, and it did improve some areas, but then it made other areas worse. So it was like. So, yeah, so I was kind of in that thing of like, well, which Valerian am I? If somebody asked me what I thought of the Valerian, it'd be like, well, which one day one or day two? And neither of them could be representative of what you might get if you just bought one. So I'm gonna hold my judgments on it. Again, it was again, for a. A portable projector and everything, it was impressive what it could do and things like that. It looked great with a lot of the content, but I don't feel like I saw like a. A true sample of it, you know, especially considering, you know, Sammy's comments on it before, who I tried trust, you know, implicit, you know, definitely trust his opinion on these kind of things. So I'm hoping to get another chance with that at some time down the line.
- [36:21]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, well, these things always evolve, you know, and as I said, there's there's always next year and there's always room for some improvement. It makes me wonder sometimes, you know, the, the rate at which things improve continues. But I'm one. I'm wondering if it's kind of flattening out and the amount of improvement one year to the next is decreasing. It seems to be sort of what you guys are saying.
- [36:48]
John Schuerman
Well, that's one of the reasons why we waited three years to do another shootout. We just didn't see that much of a change. But at cd, I saw the new Sony tone mapping. I'm like, oh, wow, okay. This solves a lot of the problems that we saw in the previous shootout that I thought, you know, Sony was there for that one and, and actually did talk to Chris and, and some of us after that and, and it was really nice that they were listening to the input. And I have no idea if we have anything to do with their improvements, but certainly that was substantially better. And a lot of the scenes, it was hard to tell the JVC and the Sony apart until it got really dark. The Zero Dark. It was interesting when we asked for the side by side stuff, people always ask for Zero Dark Thirty, the dark scene from Oblivion. And Chris made a point of, I made a point of bringing up that bright scene because that Alpha clip that he was talking about, it looked better on the Sony. They did a better job. I think there's a 4,000 or a 10,000 nit grade on that film. And Sony, the internal tone mapping did a better job, at least with the settings that we had. Now we messed around with it. We might have been able to make some changes to it, but again, when it went darker, the JVC kind of pulled ahead. So we don't have any problem recommending any of these depending on the use case.
- [38:04]
Scott Wilkinson
Right, right, exactly. And as you have said to me, offline consumers can get any of these products from the screening room along with some consultation, I'm sure.
- [38:17]
John Schuerman
Yeah, we talk through the application and Chris often talks about this too. And I'm sure Sami, it's the same thing. And Steve, I know for sure because he's our lead designer. Often we get people trying to do these tremendous screens, 180, 200 inch, whatever, and they're trying to put a projector that's maybe 2000 lumens with it. So that's the kind of stuff based upon doing these type of evaluations. Now we can speak intelligently to what they're trying to do and what they're trying to accomplish. The other thing and I would love to hear some other comments on this. There's this idea that, oh, for hdr, you need lots and lots and lots and lots of brightness. Well, that's true to a certain degree, but we started talking about contrast in terms of dynamic range because she always talking about the darkest black versus the brightest white. That's contrast. And the better the contrast, the more HDR material pops. Even though the Epson was the brightest projector, even though the JVC was considerably dimmer, it had more pop to it because you had more of a difference between black and white. So it's dynamic range, not just brightness.
- [39:19]
Scott Wilkinson
Right.
- [39:20]
John Schuerman
I don't know if Chris or Sammy wanted to clarify anything there, if I got anything wrong there.
- [39:24]
Chris Deering
Yeah, I thought the HDR tests, especially with the first group, you know, with the Valerian and the Epson actually being quite a bit brighter, you know, on paper than the jvc, as Sammy brought up earlier. You know, light is logarithmic. You know, it's, it's not something that we're just going to be like, oh, well, this is a hundred and one hundred nits, and this is 200 nits. It's double the brightness. It doesn't work like that. And you know, with the Epson being quite a bit brighter than the other ones, it was surprising how little difference that made in the brighter sequences. Again, I would expect it to look different with like something like Zero Dark Thirty, because if you have like, again, like, you know, the Epson, where it's being bright and has a, a finite amount, you know, a smaller amount of overall dynamic range than the jvc, I would expect the, the darker scenes to not look as good because they're brighter to begin with. Because again, the projector can only go so much darker than it's, than its peak point, so it's going to look more washed out. That's, that's how contrast works. But in the brighter sequences, stuff that I actually like wid picked it because we didn't do Sammy and I never in any of this in the, in the, the pre setup or anything. Again, we spent so much time in the calibration phase that we looked at some of these clips, but we never did a comparison of anything with the clips. So we basically just picked the clips arbitrarily saying like, hey, we really want to get some really bright stuff, some mid stuff and some dark stuff. And then we were just recalling stuff that we've seen or seen demoed over time and saying like, oh, that would be a good one for a bright One. But in no, at no time before this event did Sammy and I like sit there with like two of these projectors on and go like, okay, well how does this look compared to this one, you know, or things like that? So the event in, in a lot of ways was the first time I got to see, you know, again, you know, things that I thought were going to happen again with the, the brightness differences, I was expecting a more dramatic difference with some of the really bright stuff just looking brighter and it didn't in some cases, like even in the side by sides, you know, there was almost no visible difference between them where you thought that there would be and stuff like that. So.
- [41:56]
Scott Wilkinson
Well, very good. Anybody else have any final comments? Steve?
- [42:01]
Steve Crab
Yeah, I was just going to say a lot of these things are interrelated too. Right. So you'll hear and I kind of live in the world of the groups and the forums and so you'll see, oh, it's all about the contrast or it's all about the brightness. And really these things are more linked than you'd think they would be. So yeah, if your projector is way on the dim side, you don't have nearly enough light, then your contrast is not going to matter that much because you don't have enough light output. And if the contrast and the projector is really bright but it has terrible contrast, it's not going to look great either. So ideally you want enough of both to have the kind of the effect that you're trying to achieve. That's what we always try to help people with, is hey, how big is your screen? Do you have light control? Do you game? What are you trying to achieve? What's your budget? That's a big one obviously.
- [42:56]
Scott Wilkinson
Of course.
- [42:57]
Steve Crab
And so I was surprised at how good the Valerian looked. Even though the contrast number, if you just looked at it, you'd go, oh well that's by far the worst of the bunch. And yeah, there's obviously some big differences in image quality there. But for somebody who's on a budget, maybe somebody who games, that might be a great pick.
- [43:16]
Scott Wilkinson
Right? Yeah.
- [43:18]
John Schuerman
Again, application based and that's why again we didn't do the scoring type thing this time because we would have then had scoring categories, best for gaming, best for this, best for that. It would have been very complicated. Yeah, hopefully you can see the lengths that we go through and everybody here I think has spoken to, to make sure it was fair and, and level playing field and doing that. And you know, there's no perfect way. I just one Person online was talking about how, oh, it'd been great if they blacked out the entire room. It was fifteen hundred dollars a day just to rent the black. If somebody wants to send us, if somebody wants to privately fund these things and not expect anything in return other than knowledge, we'll happily accept those types of contributions. But we do the best we can. And I think the results can speak of themselves. They're pretty definitive. We think in terms of whatever. There's always limitations, there's always different styles of doing things.
- [44:14]
Scott Wilkinson
Sure.
- [44:15]
John Schuerman
We learned from the last one what to do at this time. Let's make it more application based rather than this is the winner. Yeah.
- [44:23]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
And if you did like a score, like an actual scoring, there are certain things that you do need. For instance, like if you're going to be comparing them to one another and scoring them, then you need to actually have a reference. And then you're going to have to have content that is tailored to point out flaws to, to a certain degree so that you can see who actually is able to reproduce the content faithfully. So you would need a reference. You'd have to actually start calling things out specifically. And in most cases, not to say it's not worth it, but in this type of setting, I don't think it's something that you would really want to do because at the end of the day, in a vacuum, again, you're not watching two projectors at the same time ever. In a vacuum. You will never, not that you will never notice a lot of this stuff, but a lot of the stuff you won't see.
- [45:14]
Scott Wilkinson
Right. Yeah.
- [45:15]
John Schuerman
And just one other thing, just obviously we've given our opinions here. There's opinions of I think a good half a dozen or more people that were at the shootout. We have, some of them wrote us very detailed long descriptions of what they thought. So I think the opinions pretty much line up with what we've been saying here. But we encourage people to actually look at the landing page. We just finished before, Right before we went live here. And you can read comments from other people that attended and we did not edit those. They are what people had say. Right. I think you left them pretty much the way they were, didn't you?
- [45:50]
Chris Deering
Yep.
- [45:51]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah, yeah, that was my final question, which is the, the write up is now online, it's now live and people can comment, can post comments on it, right?
- [46:01]
John Schuerman
Yeah, I think it's a blog thing. I'm looking at it right now. I think we've.
- [46:05]
Scott Wilkinson
Yeah.
- [46:05]
John Schuerman
This commenting loud at the bottom.
- [46:07]
Scott Wilkinson
Yes, absolutely.
- [46:08]
Steve Crab
Yeah. And there's also a big thread on AVS forum and several posts on home theater enthusiasts. So lots of places to engage and discuss this stuff.
- [46:18]
Scott Wilkinson
Excellent, Excellent. Well, we'll put the link to the report on the screening room in the show notes and I encourage people to go check that out where there will be lots of information and lots of lively discussion. No doubt.
- [46:32]
John Schuerman
Yeah, already is on avs. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that always is on avs.
- [46:36]
Scott Wilkinson
I have no doubt of that.
- [46:38]
John Schuerman
And on HD Enthusiast too, Home theater enthusiast, Steve's group. That's certainly that happens in real time, right? In Facebook.
- [46:45]
Scott Wilkinson
Absolutely. Okay, great. Well, thanks you so much for being here, all four of you. John Schuerman, owner of the screening room av, thanks so much.
- [46:56]
John Schuerman
Thank you. This was great as always, Scott. Thank you.
- [46:58]
Scott Wilkinson
It's always great to see you. And Steve Crabb also@the screeningroom.com and the moderator of the home theater enthusiast group on Facebook.
- [47:08]
Steve Crab
Thanks for having us, Scott. Really appreciate it.
- [47:10]
Scott Wilkinson
You bet. Chris Deering, owner of Deep Dive AV and a calibrator of long and respected standing. Thanks so much for being here.
- [47:19]
Chris Deering
Always a pleasure, Scott. Thanks.
- [47:21]
Scott Wilkinson
Thank you. And Sammy Prescott Jr. Another calibrator of long and respected standing, I am sure. Thank you so much for being here.
- [47:30]
Sammy Prescott Jr.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
- [47:32]
Scott Wilkinson
You bet. So. So that's it. Go check it out. It's. It's really. It was really an interesting event and I'm sorry I wasn't there. Maybe next year or next time, shall we say, when there's enough of a difference to make a difference. Now, in some episodes, I answer listener and viewer questions, so I hope you will send them along to HTG@TWIT TV and I'll answer as many as I can right here on the show. And as you know by now, all of TWiT's programs are available on YouTube for free, but with ads. If you want to go ad free, join the club. Go to TWiT TV club TWiT to join up and get all of TWiT's programming, including home theater geeks, ad free. Until next time, geek out.