My Final NP5 Settings

After 6 weeks of use, I have settled on some settings that I am pretty happy with. I thought of sharing them so you can try them out, see if they work for you.

I have black walls and black ceiling with light absorbing panels above and next to the screen. I will share the transformation of my home cinema soon so watch out for that article.

SDR Settings

• Picture Mode: Natural or a user picture more
• Lamp: Low lamp
• Aperture: -9 (provides great midpoint between on / off, ANSI and dynamic contrast)
• Aperture mode (Auto Iris): Auto 1 (I don’t find this as aggressive as Auto 1 is on the X series which is good but it provides a bit better perception of contrast on the NP5 than Auto 2 without any major gamma issues I could detect)
• Brightness: 0
• Gamma: 2.4
• MPC: Standard – Enhance on 7
• CMD: Motion compensation on Low and enhance on Low

HDR Settings

• Picture Mode: Frame Adapt HDR
• Lamp: Low lamp (this is one great trick of the NP5: you can keep it in low lamp for HDR due to its frame to frame tone mapping!!)
• Aperture: 0
• Aperture Mode (Auto Iris): Auto 1
• Brightness: -2
• Theatre Optimiser: on with the right screen size (you must set this per installation mode and get it to calculate based on your screen size setting.)
• HDR Processing: Frame to Frame
• HDR Level: 1 (yes, this is quite high but this provides excellent contrast without blowing out highlight and it is kind of needed if you have the unit in low lamp)
• MPC: Standard – Enhance on 7 (you can also use High-Res 1 here but it has less contrast adaptive sharpening which used to be called Clear Black).
• CMD: Motion compensation on Low and Enhance on Low

Other Settings

Some other settings of note:

• Aspect ratio: Zoom mode for any content with black bars to improve brightness and normal otherwise (you can save this in multiple installation settings if need be together with zoom, etc.) The Zoom aspect ratio fills the whole panel which is wider than consumer 4K so you get extra brightness. I really recommend this setting as it allows HDR to be watched in low lamp even on larger screens – at least for the first 500-700 hours.
• Panel Alignment: I had to align the panels using the fine controls (in 8-step increments corresponding to 1 pixel) as there is a bug with the full pixel panel alignment. Don’t use fine panel alignment in smaller than 8 step increments as it reduces the resolution of the RGB channels which can cause loss of fine detail. Even less should you do zone adjustment. However, your milage may vary.

It is ideal if you can auto-calibrate your unit with JVC’s auto-calibration software, as it isn’t very accurate out of the box at all. Auto-calibration does need a manual check however as it can go badly wrong without you knowing.

You can find some resources here if you’d like to learn calibration. I will also aim to provide new articles over the next year to help you get started as it’s a critical part of home cinema everyone should learn the basics of. This is especially true if you spent this much money on a projector. Getting a colorimeter and learning the basics is simply a no-brainer to get the very best out of your investment.

Colorimeter Correction Spectral Sample (CCSS)

I also wanted to share the CCSS which can be used to tailor the i1 Display Pro / Colorchecker Display / Colormunki Display / Spyder 4 / Spyder 5 devices to the NP5 to provide more accuracy in calibrating them. The CCSS was done with an i1 Pro 3 in high res (3nm) mode with gamut in native mode. I did one for both high and low lamp for even higher accuracy. To use them, you will need HCFR or DisplayCal and pop them into the color folder under C:\Users\<your name>\App Data\Roaming\Color for HCFR or under Argyll folder in the same place for ArgyllCMS and DisplayCal.

30 Jun ‘22 update: you should not use the high lamp CCSS, only the low lamp one even for high lamp. An error crept into the HL sample. I can only theorize why but it will be redone. I’ll create a CCSS notification list so you can get notified of updated CCSS files. Check back in a few days for an update. Thx!

8 Jul ’22: the high-lamp CCSS has now been verified and I provide an updated package below. There wasn’t an issue with the original high-lamp file. I verified my spectrometer is working correctly and verified it against measurements taken by others using higher-end spectrometers. The data checks out. In any case, the new package includes a high-resolution and normal resolution high-lamp CCSS. I recommend you use the high-res version, but the low-res version should get you closer to reference than not using a CCSS.