Home Theater Geeks 480 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
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 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Podcasts you love.

00:17 - Kris Deering (Guest)
From people you trust.

00:20 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
This is TWiT.

00:32 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
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 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.

01:09 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Thanks, scott. I'm excited to get on to the results here. Yeah, me too, which is what everybody wants to hear, right?

01:16 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Also from the Screening Room is Steve Crabb, a system designer and a sales and marketing guy. Hey, Steve, welcome back.

01:24 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Hey Scott, thanks for having us, you bet Nice to be here.

01:27 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
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. Thanks, it's been a long time, yeah, a whole week. And finally we have Sammy Prescott Jr, an ISF Level 3 calibrator himself with some 15 years or more of experience and a reviewer of projectors at ProjectorCentralcom. Sammy, welcome back, Thanks for having me again, Scott.

02:03
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 projector actually five projectors. Two of there were seven, but two of them were in a different room. 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, two 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 episode, because that was a really interesting discussion about.

03:08
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 a Stewart StudioTek 100, 140-inch 16x9, and in a separate room. As you can see in this list, two really high brightness epsons uh, the ql 7000 and 3000 uh, mostly the 7000 I believe, because it's 10 000 lumens, which is a light cannon. Seriously, that was shown on 180inch screen and they were all shown in a different room and not really evaluated, just shown. Hey, here's what we can do 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?

04:17 - Kris Deering (Guest)
No, it was definitely a collaborative effort. Oh, okay, 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, uh, 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 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 just adds a little bit more to the event to know that two people that are, you know, calibrators or 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 (Host)
Yeah, yeah, sammy, in your pre-calibrations, did you? I assume you used the same screen, yes.

05:30 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Yeah, so all these screens were in the screening room's 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 had bounced 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, we're going to use this picture mode. So it worked really well. Um, and it's kind of scary that we both do a lot of the same stuff.

06:16 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Like that's a good thing, 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 I'm sure there's some art to it I know there is on how to get there.

06:45 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Yeah, 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 (Host)
Oh, I'm sure of that. I have no idea. I have 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 Schuermann (Guest)
Scott, yes, go ahead. Can I just interject something real quick? Just to clarify something. Oh sure, I'm sorry this is kind of totally unrelated, but I just wanted 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 (Host)
Oh, okay, no, that's a great clarification. I really appreciate it.

07:35 - John Schuermann (Guest)
And then the other thing is that we do these types 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. So, anyway, that's the extent of it and then I'll shut up and we'll move on.

07:51 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay, well, I will say that in some cases, the shootout has a clear winner, like 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 gets graded, and you have a winner. In this case, you didn't, because you knew that certain projectors would be good for certain things and other projectors would be good for other things. It depends on what the customer, what the goals, are to. That really helps you determine which, what's the best projector for them. Right, Precisely.

08:29 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, that was the. That was the goal this time around, 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. Yeah, and we try to give that context.

08:41 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay, but we want to make clear that the screening room is not a shopping cart site, and when I say it's an online retailer, that may be a bit of a misnomer and I apologize.

08:52 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Oh, no problem, we're kind of an odd animal and it confuses a lot of people and confuses the manufacturers that we work with and even their reps sometimes.

09:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So I'll shut up about that, I just want to make sure. Okay, all right, 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.

10:01 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
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 a thousand, or not a thousand, a hundred nits, like it's not really supposed to be any brighter. So we tried to get the sdr uh to be on the target of 100 nits or as close to it as possible, and you got really close yeah, we got really close.

10:34
and the thing is is that when you look at luminance luminance is a lot rhythmic you're not going to notice the difference between going to notice the difference between 102 nits and 106, like you can't really see that, um, and then we basically just let them run at full brightness for whatever they're capable of for HDR. Um, 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, 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 (Host)
Why is it, Chris, that the JVCs have such greater contrast ratio than any of the others?

11:46 - Kris Deering (Guest)
contrast ratio than any of the others JVCs. They're known for what's called the L-cost chips, so liquid crystal on silicone, or DILA is what they typically refer to it, as 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 (Host)
So the light actually goes through the LCD panel twice. Correct Comes in, gets reflected off the mirror in the back plane and then back out through the LCD panel again. As you mentioned 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 - Kris Deering (Guest)
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 JVC, 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 groups.

13:27 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
The Sony got pretty good in HDR. It was at like 10,000 to 1. Sdr 9431 to 1, so not that much different.

13:38 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Yeah, so the Sony? There they're. So again, we kind of talk about these numbers because they 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 else. They all have dynamic modulating systems that can help increase their contrast ratio subjectively.

14:23
Again, there's always trade-offs in that 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 NZ900's numbers, because we have a lot of light headroom, light output headroom, trying to get to the SDR at 100 nits, we can 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 one.

15:07 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In SDR.

15:09 - Kris Deering (Guest)
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. 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 one with this specific one.

15:32 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right. So it actually lowered the contrast ratio in both JVC cases.

15:37 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Correct, right, and you also have to factor in the room. A room plays a huge part in this. Um. So, like, if you have a black floor in your room of, say, 0.002 and you can get it pretty bright and keep the black floor low, then your contrast is going to effectively look like looks like it increases, um. 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 (Host)
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 of the room you're listening in, and the lower the noise floor, the greater the dynamic range of audio that you can reproduce. It's a almost a perfect analogy yeah it works.

16:34 - Kris Deering (Guest)
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
Now what happens in a room like what we were in, is your mixed contrast changes. So, as you have mixed images, 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 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 screen back onto itself from the walls, like that whatever.

17:45 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, did you guys do antsy contrast measurements? That's when you put up a checkerboard of white and black and 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? Alternating white and black and you take measurements from each of those?

18:03 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Did you do that?

18:06 - Kris Deering (Guest)
No, we didn't do any ANSI measurements on this. The ANSI contrast measurement is a little misunderstood because it only represents one mixed contrast number, which is a 50% APL, which is representative of pretty much nothing you're ever going to watch.

18:20 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
By the way, apl is average picture level for those who don't know the term.

18:23 - Kris Deering (Guest)
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 eight to 10%. So if you're taking a measurement at 50%, you know 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. So it's representative of what the dynamic range was of the display that we were looking at in terms of its overall capability.

19:12 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Mm-hmm.

19:13 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
And natively, none of this was using dynamic.

19:17 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
None of this was using dynamic contrast Correct?

19:19 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Yeah, this is just their native performance, right? None of this was using dynamic contrast, correct?

19:21 - Kris Deering (Guest)
yeah, this is just their native performance, right right 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 apps and all of them had some kind of dynamic contrast system on, and again we picked the mode that we did based on our experience with them and what we felt gave the best results.

19:49 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I've sometimes experienced dynamic contrast in projectors as being noticeable, being visible, having some sort of pumping effect. Did you notice any of that?

20:03 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
visible, the having some sort of pumping effect. Did you notice any of that with one of them, I would say for the most part we did. That was probably the epson um, specifically with the scene in um oblivion. They might have happened with another, actually. No, it also happened with, uh, one of the zero dark 30 scenes with the epson um, but outside of that it didn't really pop up too much yeah, it was one of those things like for a frame or something.

20:26 - John Schuermann (Guest)
It was just all of a sudden you saw it do something and I don't know if the average attendee noticed that.

20:32 - Kris Deering (Guest)
But I mean, all of us are trained to look at this stuff sure, sure, sure exactly and we made it a point during these, like during each one of those showings, to not 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 again the event is labeled as a shootout. I feel like you know, it's like yeah, 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.

21:07
You know, maybe these are projectors that they're thinking about buying themselves. It gives them a chance to see them at their best, to see how they compare. Do I really need to spend this much money? Or whatever you know and get educated at the same time, or whatever you know 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 wasn't the point of it. 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 (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I agree completely, and once you point it out, then you can't unsee it. You'll see it everywhere.

21:52 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, perfect example, that would be DLP rainbows.

21:55 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
DLP rainbows Exactly what I was thinking.

21:58 - John Schuermann (Guest)
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 (Host)
Good, good. 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.

22:29 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, the write-up should be live. Steve and I have been sweating over that thing for the last couple of days, trying to get it up and it's up and live.

22:37 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Oh, yes, and it is live, and I'm sure we'll put it in the show notes so people can just click on it.

22:41 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, so I wrote the basic draft of that and then had Chris and Sammy and Steve all take a look at it. Say, do you guys concur generally with what I'm saying? And I would say that, well, that's so far what they told me. 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 Right next since the event, because we've all got back to our lives. So it'll be interesting to hear differences in perception. So I'll share my thoughts overall.

23:05
Back in 2000 or back in 2022, I would almost call it a route where the JVC just dominated at every 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 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.

23:54
The Epson's and 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 30 or the darker scene in Oblivion, it was pretty obvious that the JVC was superior to any of the other projectors. The Sony, I thought, looked quite good, 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 to 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.

24:36 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, yeah, exactly, we're looking at that again now.

24:39 - John Schuermann (Guest)
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 was 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.

24:58
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 sent back from what would probably most people consider a standard viewing distance. But so you know, personally I still like the JVCs at the various price points, especially that 1200 NZ500 at the price point is just stupid good.

25:25
And Valerian was interesting, I mean for something $3,000 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 past. I personally didn't see the rainbow effect, though we did have a fair number of people and you 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 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.

26:12 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Sure Steve, how about you?

26:15 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Yeah, I mean okay. So you know I was kind of concerned with helping run the event so I was probably paying as much attention, as I usually would.

26:23 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, I get that.

26:24 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Yeah, but I'm an old photography nerd. You know black and white and 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, crt projection, and I loved the on-off contrast, or the sequential contrast that Chris was talking about in CRT projectors, because they're blacks or 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 Sonys that I that I think you know looks really good and and I would probably be okay with even having in my own room. Um, and probably the biggest takeaway for me looking at the whole group was there wasn't a bad projector there. Um, they all looked, they all looked really good. And if you get into, you know, splitting hairs, you can say, oh, this, this looked really good here and this looked really good here. But, uh, you know, all the projectors looked really good and I think most people would be proud to have them in their room.

27:24
And as a designer and as a consultant working with people, um, you know, I have a really great group of tools that I can, that I can choose from now. Um, 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 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, you know, we've all seen the hyperbole, you know, oh, the, the big, 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 you know, 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.

28:26 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, and if I could just kind of piggyback a little bit of what Steve said just again, we're 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, 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 where 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 jbc, that nz 500 tremendous projector for the money, but we were pushing it kind of to its limit at 140 inch screen. If you want to go bigger, you need to be looking at one of the brighter projectors, either from jbc or one of the other manufacturers uh, sammy, how about you?

29:19 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
yeah, I would agree. Um, there really wasn 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 high dynamic range and contrast, you would probably look at a JVC.

29:57
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. Um, you know, again, it's going to depend on what's most important, most important to you. So if you want super wide gamut coverage, you might look at the valerian, 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. Um, I think overall, though, as good as they are, they could all be better, like they can all stand to improve, sure.

31:02 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So that and thus thus cometh next year. Yeah, 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 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.

31:54
There's a lot of stuff to take into account here, isn't there, Chris?

31:57 - Kris Deering (Guest)
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 like.

32:09
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 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. Um, 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 need something for gaming and I absolutely need the lowest lag. Okay, that that eliminates some stuff, or 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. Um, I thought the epson was probably the most surprising of the bunch to me. Um, 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. Um, 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 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 darkest material, you know, and stuff and kind of like as you got towards the bottom and stuff. But outside of that they largely look more similar than dissimilar.

34:28
Um, the Valerian was. The Valerian is the only one that I'm going to reserve judgment on. Um Valerian had sent us some software to load at their request for this event and the first day that we did 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.

34:49
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, I'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.

35:24
So I'm going to hold my judgments on it Again. It was again for 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 true sample of it. You know, especially considering you know Sammy's comments on it before, who I trust you know implicit, you know definitely trust his opinion on these kinds of things. So I'm hoping to get another chance with that at some time down the line.

35:50 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, Well, these things always evolve, you know, and, as I said, there's always next year and there's always room for some improvement. It makes me wonder sometimes. You know, the rate at which things improve continues, but 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.

36:18 - John Schuermann (Guest)
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 Cedia 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 actually did talk to Chris and some of us after that 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.

36:52
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 30, the dark scene from Oblivion stuff. People always ask for Zero Dark Thirty, the dark scene from Oblivion Chris made a point of. I made a point of bringing up that bright scene because that alpha clip that he was talking about 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, if we messed around with it we might've been able to make some changes to it. But again, when it went darker, the JVC kind of pulled ahead.

37:28 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So we don't have any problem recommending any of these, depending on the use case, 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.

37:47 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, we talked through the application, and Chris often talks about this too, and I'm sure Sammy 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 types 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.

38:22
Well, that's true to a certain degree, but we started talking about contrast in terms of dynamic range, because you're always talking about the darkest black versus the brightest white. That's contrast, and the better the contrast, the more HDR material pops. So even though, like say, 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, right? I don't know if Chris or Sammy wanted to clarify anything there, if I got anything wrong there.

38:58 - Kris Deering (Guest)
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 not something that we're just going to be like oh well, this is 100 nits and this is 200 nits, it's double the brightness.

39:17
It doesn't work like that and you know, with the Epson being quite a bit brighter than the other ones. 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 finite amount, you know a smaller amount of overall dynamic range than the JVC I would expect 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 its peak point, so it's going to look more washed out. That's how contrast works.

40:03
But in the brighter sequences sequences stuff that I actually like when we 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 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.

41:02
Again, with 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.

41:25 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, very good. Anybody else have any final comments, Steve?

41:30 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, a lot of these things are interrelated too, right? So you'll hear like, 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 you know, 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 in 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.

42:12
So and that's what we always try to help people with is is hey, how big is your screen? Do you have light control? Do you game? You know what are you trying to achieve? What's your budget? That's a big one, obviously. And so you know 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 you know be a might be a great pick right, yeah, again, application based.

42:48 - John Schuermann (Guest)
And 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, right, right, right. 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 level playing field, and doing that. There's no perfect way. Just one person online was talking about how it would have been great if they blacked out the entire room. It was $1,500 a day just to rent the black.

43:20
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 it's. I think the results can speak for themselves. They're pretty definitive. We think, in terms of whatever, there's always limitations and there's always different styles of doing things and we learned, and we learned from the last one to do it. This time, let's make it more application based rather than this is the winner, right right, yeah.

43:53 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
And if you did 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 up 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, Right yeah?

44:45 - John Schuermann (Guest)
And I. 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, Right, and you can read comments from other people that attended and we did not edit those. They are what people had to say.

45:16
I think you left them pretty much the way they were, didn't you, yep?

45:20 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, that was my final question, which is the write-up is now online, it's now live and people can comment, can post comments on it, right? Yeah, I think it's a blog thing.

45:32 - John Schuermann (Guest)
I'm looking at it right now. I think we've. Yeah, there's commenting allowed at the bottom. Yes, absolutely.

45:37 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
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, excellent, excellent.

45:48 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
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, yeah it already is on AVS.

46:03 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure of that. You always is on AVS, I have no doubt of that. And on HT Enthusiast too, Home Theater Enthusiast, Steve's group, that's certainly you know. That happens in real time right In Facebook.

46:14 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely Okay. Great Well, thanks you so much for being here, all four of you. John Shurman, owner of the Screening Room, av. Thanks so much, no thank you.

46:26 - John Schuermann (Guest)
This was great, as always.

46:29 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Scott, thank you. It's always great to see you and Steve Crabb also at thescreeningroomcom and the moderator of the Home Theater Enthusiast Group on Facebook.

46:37 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Thanks, for having us, scott, really appreciate it, you bet.

46:40 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Chris Deering, owner of Deep Dive AV and a calibrator of long and respected standing, thanks so much for being here. Always a pleasure, scott, thanks. Thank you. And Sammy Prescott Jr, another calibrator of long and respected standing, I am sure. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, you bet. So that's it, go check it out. 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.

47:19
In some episodes I answer listener and viewer questions, so I hope you will send them along to htg at twittv 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 twittv, slash club twit to join up and get all of Twit's programmings, including Home Theater Geeks, ad-free Until next time geek out. Thank you.