JVC DLA-RS440 Review – One Serious, 4K Capable, Home Theater Projector Calibration Settings

JVC DLA-RS440 and X590U 4K UHD Home Theater Projector Review – Calibration Settings: Calibration Presets Notes, Best Mode Calibration, Brightest Mode Calibration & 4K Calibration

Note: The projector had over 257 Hours on the lamp before I calibrated it and took the light measurements. A brand-new lamp will most likely have slightly higher measured lumens.

The RS440U has 9 picture mode presets (User 1-5, Cinema, Natural, Animation and HDR) I spent most of my time with User 1-2 & HDR modes.

Cinema, User and Natural modes all measured very similar. For my Best (dark room) calibration I choose User 1 mode and set the lamp to low. I kept the default Color Profile at Standard, Color Temp at 6500 and the default Gamma at Normal. I lowered Contrast to -2 to help with gamma and raised brightness to 1. Color and Tint I kept at 0. White balance pre-measurements came in about 7000K average at a 2.19 average gamma with DeltaE ranging from 5 at 50IRE and down to 2-3 on the low and high ends. The whites clipped at 232 and lowering contrast had no effect. Color (CMS) also measured very good (See advanced calibration page). No too bad but definitely room for improvement.

The 2-point white balance calibration was straightforward and I able to obtain a fairly flat 6500K white balance except for the darker end of the grayscale (10-20IRE ending up a little on the warm side (6200K). The RS440U has a unique 3-point gamma control consisting of Picture Tone, Dark Level & Bright Level. Dark Level adjusts the 0-10IRE range while the Bright Level adjusts 80-90IRE. My target gamma for my Best (dark room) calibration was 2.4 and I found it necessary only to set Picture Tone to -10 to achieve a fairly flat 2.34 average gamma.

Post calibration yielded excellent results with DeltaE ranging from .5 to 1.2 at 100IRE. Anything below 3 is considered excellent and imperceptible to the human eye. Final calibrated lumen output measured at 1180, not bad at all for low lamp.

Delta E is a metric for understanding how the human eye perceives color difference. The term delta comes from mathematics, meaning change in a variable or function. The suffix E references the German word Empfindung, which broadly means sensation. Simply put, look at Delta E as a measure of grayscale/color accuracy. 3 and under is considered ‘Excellent’ and imperceptible by the human eye.

For my Brightest calibration I choose User 2 mode with the lamp set to high. I started with Color Profile set to Custom 1 because I had already used Standard for my Best (dark room) calibration. Same with Color Temp and Gamma, here I used Custom 1 for both. All of these presets measure the same as the defaults (7000K) I used for my Best (dark room) calibration. Again, I set Contrast to -2 to help with white balance uniformity and Brightness to 1. Color and Tint stayed at 0.

My target gamma for my Brightest calibration is 2.10. To help achieve this under Custom 1 gamma I set Picture Tone to -4 and Dark Level to 2. Post-calibration average gamma measure 2.07 at a hefty 1724 lumens. DeltaE averaged a .5 to 1.2 with 10IRE just under 2. Once again excellent results.

My final calibration was for 4K/HDR content. I used HDR mode with HDR Color Profile. I set Color Temp to HDR/6500 and Gamma to HDR (ST.2084). Pre-calibration white balance was again consistent to what I measured with SDR. I left Contrast and Brightness along with Color and Tint all at their defaults of 0. EOTF (gamma) measured a little under (darker) our target. Raising both Dark Level to 5 and Bright Level to 2, along with my white balance calibration put EOTF spot on target.

Now as you may be aware your results, depending on your screen (size, gain, material) may vary. For example, if you feel the darkest portion of the image is still too crushed you can increase Dark Level even further. If you find the overall image appears to dark you can raise the overall EOTF (gamma) by increasing Picture Tone. Post DeltaE was .5 to 2 except for 60IRE at a 4. For HDR I consider these results excellent. Final calibrated lumen output a tiny bit higher than my Brightest calibration at 1814 lumens.