JVC NZ700 DILA 4K Projector: A Review of Expected Performance

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UPDATE: Our final hands-on review of the NZ700 is here.

I thought it would be helpful to provide some performance predictions on the newly announced NZ700. While the NZ500 is pretty much a base-equipped NP5, with new scaling, I feel that the NZ700 is a bit more interesting one to cover.

Brightness

The improved brightness in a much smaller chassis is achieved by using a larger lens aperture than the NZ7 and NZ8 before it. In fact, the NZ700 uses an 80mm lens, which is approx. 25% larger than the current 65mm lens, and 25% smaller than the NZ9’s 100mm lens (depends how you calculate it but it’s in the ballpark).

This actually puts the NZ700 between the NZ800 and NZ900 in terms of light efficiency. However, using a larger lens will also have a knock-on effect to open-iris contrast, which we will look at in a moment.

The NZ700’s 2300 lumens is not visibly less than the NZ8’s 2500 lumens. However, consider that the NZ8 has around a 5-7% upper hand due to light recycling being higher under 10% APL than on these new DILA chips. This does make the NZ8 look brighter than the 200 lumens difference would indicate. However, 2300 lumens is still excellent and very welcome, considering this is not an LCD projector, which has a much higher light efficiency.

Contrast

Open-iris contrast will likely fall between the NZ800 and NZ900. This means I expect around 26,000:1 with iris fully open and closest to the screen. This is around the same as an NZ8 gets, and better than we can expect from the average NZ900, which is around 22,000:1. However, it is worse than we can expect from the NZ800, which has around 30,000:1.

So basically, we will be in NZ8 territory in terms of on/off contrast.

Since ANSI contrast is dependent on the end to end optical block AND the new lens system, this is much harder to predict. With DILA, we see that larger aperture higher element lenses tend to decrease ANSI somewhat – as is the case with the NZ900 versus NZ800. However, the new 80mm lens system has 15 elements versus the 65mm lens’ 17 elements. So there is a reduction of optical elements here which could help ANSI – or balance the game here.

ANSI also depends on whether the new optical block is a high-contrast optical block or not. According to our sources, it is. However, it still doesn’t mean these units will land in at over 300:1 like the NZ800 units do.

This is a wild guess, but I expect the NZ700 to be around the 300:1 mark, but not reaching the same high ANSI numbers as the NZ800, which is closer to around 400:1 at the lens, and around 330:1 when measuring using our equipment away from the lens. What hits the screen is much less than that, of course.

If our sources are wrong, and the NZ700 doesn’t contain a high-contrast optical block, then ANSI could fall in closer to 250:1, more along the lines of the X-series. This would still be a big improvement over the 175:1 that the NP5 and NZ7 generally gets.

Sharpness

The larger lens will contribute to optical sharpness. In fact, this might be a brand new lens design that JVC might migrate all other units over to over time. So I have high hopes here!

From a practical point of view, the new lens might be only a slight improvement in sharpness. However, I hope it will deliver less variation from unit to unit over time – and hopefully better edge to edge sharpness, which is what the larger lenses tend to do.

One of the bigger improvement will be the new super-resolution-enhanced scaling engine. While there is no 8K upscaling here, it will help with scaling 4K content to the full DCI 4K resolution of the panel. Since this scaling can end up softening the image without 8K eShift, JVC has done a lot of work on the scaling engine to mitigate this, as seen on the NZ800 and NZ900. So I predict that these units will look sharper than the NP5, NZ7 and even possibly the NZ8 and NZ9. However, those higher-end units will still have the edge in terms of detail retrieval.

One of the other improvements in the software is actually helping motion resolution. It should bring these units in line with the NZ8 and NZ9 in this department. (When those units are in High Resolution 2 MPC mode, as that has the highest motion resolution on those units when eShift was enabled.)

Other Performance Considerations

• Unfortunately, both the NZ500 and NZ700 seem to lose 3D support. However, I would argue that this is a good cut to get a reduced price. 3D is best with higher brightness and the higher-end units still support it.
• There is no 8K or 4K/120Hz input here. However, considering how good a gaming machine the NZ800 and NZ900 are due to the much-upgraded software and massively reduced latency with laser dimming, CMD and even Frame Adapt HDR, I would expect that people won’t miss 4K/120Hz. These machines will still perform really well.
• No eShift here, that means no 8K input. This had to go to reduce the price and it was the right thing to cut. There is no 8K content on the horizon, and as amazing as the NZ800 is with its 8K upscaling, we really needed lower-cost 4K units.

Conclusion

If I had to describe these new units in one sentence, then I would say that these are the laser follow-up units to the X-series. I believe those that waited to jump ship because of lacklustre performance or a high price will feel compelled to invest in JVC’s new NZ500 and NZ700 units, and not regret it.

The addition of a laser-light source is truly game-changing when coming from a lamp. The fact that brightness doesn’t fade and fluctuate and colours stay much more stable over time is a much better experience, and is closer to a TV.

Having said that, the laser units still shift quite a bit gamma-wise in the first 500 hours. However, once an autocal is performed at the 500hr mark, the units stay very stable for a long time without having to recalibrate. So this is a massive improvement over the lamp based units.

I do want to wait for the review units to appear – we might ask JVC for one if we get the time, so stay tuned. Until then, check out our NZ800 review here.