The day has come to crown a new king of home theater projectors. Here at the 2022 Projector Shootout in New York City, nine of the best available long throw projectors have been brought together for a Battle Royale to see which projectors (and which technologies) create the best moving pictures.
The Shootout was hosted by Value Electronics and Dealerscope magazine at The Company Building in midtown Manhattan. Priced from $4,000 to $28,000, projectors from LG, Epson, Sony and JVC were fed a variety of still images, test patterns and video clips each selected to highlight particular areas of video performance. The projectors were grouped into three different price ranges to ensure that all projectors were on a level playing field.
AVProStore provided all switching, distribution, and test equipment while MetraAV provided HDMI cables (48Gbs/HDMI 2.1-compliant). Identical 120-inch screens were used for all projectors. Screens were made by Seymour Screen Excellence using their "Radiant White" screen material with unity gain (1.0).
Industry expert Philip Jones of Projector Reviews was this year's master of ceremonies. Jason Dustal, ISF Instructor and Engineer with Murideo led the set-up and measurement team as well as heading up test operations during the Shootout event.
Host Robert Zohn of Value Electronics and his wife Wendy first started hosting TV shootouts at their shop in Westchester, NY in 2004 and have been holding the event every year since. The event expanded to UST projectors last year. This is the first year the event includes traditional long throw home theater projectors.
During the Shootout, top-performing projectors were set up in a darkened room and subjected to a battery of test patterns, video clips and stills designed to highlight different elements of picture performance such as contrast, color accuracy, color volume, motion resolution and detail. Projectors were set to their most accurate out-of the box picture mode as well as their most accurate color temperature (closest to D65), then small changes were made to brightness and contrast in order to dial in their performance. Professional calibration tools and calibration software was used to verify performance and settings on each projector.
Expert judges from the video and film industries judged each projector in eleven categories - seven tests on SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) content and four tests using 4K Ultra HD HDR (High Dynamic Range) content. After all the votes were tabulated, a new "King of Home Theater Projectors" was crowned in three price categories.
A total of nine long throw projectors were evaluated, priced between $4,000 and $28,000. We saw four different imaging technologies on display: LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), DLP (Digital Light Processing), and two flavors of LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon). JVC calls theirs "D-ILA" (Digital Direct Drive Image Light Amplifier), Sony calls their SXRD (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display). The JVC and Sony projectors use native 4K imaging chips. The Epson and LG projectors use pixel shift to attain 4K resolution from lower resolution imaging chips. The JVC NZ7 uses single phase pixel shifting to double the effective resolution. The more expensive JVC projectors (NZ8, NZ9) use more advanced 4X pixel shifting to attain 8K resolution from 4K imaging chips. JVC calls this 8K eShiftX.
> Read More About Pixel Shifting on Projectors
The higher price range portions of the competition included only Sony SXRD and JVC D-ILA projectors. All of these more expensive units feature laser lighting and 4K native imaging engines. The JVC projectors use pixel shifting to increase that 4K resolution. Stepping up from the JVC NZ7 to NZ8 brings improved contrast, increased brightness and an improved version of its eShift technology. The NZ7 used single shift pixel shifting for twice the resolution. The NZ8 features 4-way pixel shift ("8K EShiftX") to effectively increase the resolution from 4K to 8K.
As in the lower price range, it was a close competition between a JVC and a Sony projector. The Sony XW6000 took the top score in three categories (bright content, SDR color accuracy and tone mapping) while the JVC NZ8 took first place in SDR shadow detail, overall detail, HDR shadow detail, HDR color accuracy and HDR color volume. Once again, a JVC took home the gold in the $11,000-$16,000 price range with Sony coming in close behind it, at a significantly lower cost.
At the very top of the price range, JVC's flagship DLA-NZ9 faced off against Sony's VPL-XW7000ES. At this price point and quality level, finding flaws is like splitting hairs. Either projector would make an excellent centerpiece of a high performance home theater system. Performance on these projectors is quite similar to the two companies' midrange units, but with higher overall brightness and improved contrast.
The Sony VPL-XW7000ES offers 3200 Lumens (compared to 2500 Lumens on the XW6000ES) as well as a corresponding improvement to color volume. With the JVC NZ9, we get a larger lens with wider lens shift capabilities. The larger lens leads to an improvement in maximum light output. The NZ8 is rated at 2500 Lumens while the NZ9 is rated at 3,000. The NZ9 offers the same 8K pixel shifting technology we saw in the NZ8.
> JVC DLA-NP5 ($6,999) - winner ($4000-$7000)
> JVC DLA-NZ8 ($15,999) - winner ($11,000-$16,000)
> JVC DLA-NZ9 ($25,999) - winner ($25,000-$30,000)
