JVC DLA-RS20 Physical Tour2

Posted on January 26, 2009 by Art Feierman

JVC DLA-RS20 Remote Control

Click to enlarge, So close. I'm not fond of this remote control. I prefer the older one that came with my JVC RS1. That remote felt better, in that the buttons had better action. I find myself pressing, not hard enough, or down at the wrong angle, requiring me having to press again. The range is a bit limited, or at least if you are bouncing the signal off of your screen, you'll have to have the angle about right on.

The backlight is good, with a a brownish yellow color (which doesn't sound inviting, but does look good), with the black labels on the buttons, making it easy to read.

Quicktip: Watch out! The IR sensors on the front and back of the RS20 are covered by some almost clear plastic. It's almost impossible to notice the plastic. If you don't remember to remove it, it definitely harms the range of the remote control. Even once removed, the range and angle could be better, but it's a near disaster with them covered.

Overall, the buttons are well organized and fairly well spaced. The buttons are of decent size. At the top are two power buttons. On the right is Power On, and on the left, is Standby (power off). You press Standby twice to power down.

The next pair are Lens (brings up the Lens focus, zoom, and shift controls), and Input.

Below those two are the Info button, Lens AP (aperture) for the manual iris, and on the right, Aspect ratio selection.

Next come eight image controls, including: Gamma, Color Temp, Color saturation, Tint, N.R. (noise reduction), Brightness, Contrast, and Sharpness.

Right above the four arrow keys in a round arrangement, are a Test button (toggles between test patterns) and a Hide button to black out the image.

In the center of the four arrow keys is a very large enter button. Below the arrow keys are the Menu button on the left, and Back button on the right.

There are 8 buttons for the modes, toward the bottom, Cinema 1, 2, Dynamic, etc. Three of the buttons are for your user defined modes User 1,2,3.

The strangest thing, is there is no button for the THX mode. What were they thinking?

Finally! the last button, a wide thin one is the backlight button. It's in a good place. Since the remote itself is very dark, it's nice that the Light button glows slightly in the dark.

JVC's remote control has a very good layout, but overall, it's not bad, but not great, either!

Click Image to Enlarge

DLA-RS20 Lens Throw

The JVC RS20's 2:1 aspect ratio zoom lens provides plenty of placement flexibility to either ceiling or shelf mount. To fill a 100 inch diagonal, 16:9 aspect ratio screen, the front of the projector can be as close as 9 feet, 11 inches, or as far back as 20 feet, 2 inches. Using these measurements for 100 inches, you can figure out the range for any other screen size.

DLA-RS20 Lens Shift

The RS20 has lots of lens shift too, and it's motorized. For that same 100 inch screen, the projector can be placed anywhere between 15 inches above the top of your screen surface, to 15 inches below the bottom of the screen surface. Those are approximates, JVC doesn't have exact numbers in its manual, but likely it's 14 inches and change above and below.

There are some projectors with a bit more lens shift, but that's pretty good flexibility. The horizontal lens shift allows a maximum of about 30 inches to the left or right of the center point.

Remember, that the two "work together" the more vertical you use, the less horizontal is available, and vice versa. If you have maximum vertical, there is no horizontal lens shift, and so on.

Anamorphic Lens

JVC is now offering an anamorphic lens and motorized sled for the JVC DLA-RS20, and HD750. Their part number is RSAL-1. It uses the Panamorph anamorphic lens and sled, and comes with a custom mounting plate with holes drilled only for the JVC projectors. That's as opposed to buying the "generic" Panamorph setup, which would come with a mounting plate with multiple holes drilled to accommodate a wide range of projectors. Using the RSAL-1 should make for an easier installation than the generic version.