[Editor's note: this review is excerpted from John's write-up of the 2004 Projector Expo.]

Next up was the JVC HX-1, which I thought had been calibrated by Chip before the shootout. It turned out that he had not received the codes in time to get it done, but Pete from JVC went in and tweaked the color gains and cuts to get it in line with what JVC considers its best performance.

The JVC's claim to fame is its extreme smoothness and lack of visual screendoor effect/pixelization. One literally has to get within 6 inches of the screen to see any pixels at all, which effectively makes it totally invisible from any reasonable seating distance. This accounts for the extreme smoothness and solidity of its image, without any jitter or dithering artifacts. Being a three chip design, there are no rainbows or color wheel whines to deal with, and the picture thrown on the 110" Firehawk was clean and colorful. Like the 777 and the Qualia, the image is rock solid.

Where the DILA technology could use improvement is in the area of contrast. Aaron set up the 7205 simultaneously with the HX-1 and split them across one screen during a break. The 7205 clearly had the deeper, more three dimensional image of the two with considerably better blacks. My opinion is that when JVC gets the contrast as high as that obtainable with DLP, they will have a clear winner on their hands. It was too bad we weren't able to get the HD2K in time for the show, as this could be a "holy grail" projector, with its claimed 2000:1 contrast ratio. For the time being DLP has the edge in contrast, depth, and dynamics, but DILA certainly has DLP beat in regard to smoothness and lack of screen door effect.

A note - when we played the DVD clip of ATTACK OF THE CLONES, the JVC did a very good job of rendering shadow detail and gave a realistic, if not terribly deep, black. It is my understanding that the JVC units do a considerable better job with dark scenes when being fed the signal via DVI, which is what we were doing with the CLONES clip (via HTPC). Certainly it did not have any of the murkiness that some have accused the JVC of having - the rendition was clean and detailed. I have found this to be true of LCD projectors as well - use DVI if at all possible

William Phelps had agreed to tweak our HX-1 for the show, but once again, time and shipping problems reared their ugly heads and interfered with our getting it to him on time. One of these days we will see a DILA projector tweaked by Mr. Phelps at one of these shootouts, as his skills are the stuff of legend...

Lastly, several people including myself noticed a slight "haze" to the image, with a halo present around very bright objects. I never noticed this on the SX21 I had back in October. Anyone have an idea as to what it was?