JVC DLA-HD750 Front Projector Page 2

PERFORMANCE A brief anecdote sums up my feelings about this projector. Id' been using the DLA-HD750 for a couple of weeks before I tried it with the Panamorph lens. After fussing for a while to get the zoom, lens-shift, brightness, and contrast settings right for the anamorphic lens and the 2.35:1 screen, I felt the need to reward myself with an old favorite. I decided to watch a couple of battle scenes from the Flyboys DVD. Two hours later, after sitting through the whole movie and marveling at how every single scene looked cleaner and more detailed than I'd ever seen it before, I said to my dog, "Now that is how this is supposed to be done." (She didn't disagree.) It's even more remarkable when you consider that the projector delivered this awesome picture from a standard-def DVD, through the light- and contrast-diminishing anamorphic lens, across a fairly large screen, with only a few controls altered from their factory settings.

It's difficult to review a product like this because its nearly perfect picture tends to pull me into the content of what I'm watching--it never produced a flaw or an artifact that reminded me I was supposed to be reviewing a projector. If you let the projector (not your Blu-ray Disc player) do all of the upscaling, you'll probably never notice a speck of noise or a single jagged edge. All you'll see is crisp detail, accurate color, deep blacks and brilliant whites.

Okay, here's one criticism: The remote has no direct-access buttons for the different inputs, so you have to keep mashing the input button until the source you want appears. And it takes a few seconds for the projector to register and display each source. The remote desperately needs a separate button for each input. Study that proposal, JVC!

BOTTOM LINE I'd be blown away if the DLA-HD750's astounding performance came about after hours of careful tweaking. But this projector delivers at least 95% of its potential if you simply switch to the THX mode and play with the basic picture controls for a couple of minutes. This combination of performance and simplicity is what we hope for but so seldom find in consumer electronics products--and it's what makes JVC's DLA-HD750 one of my favorite video products ever.

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