JVC Rear Projection TV Gaffney SC

JVC HD-61FN97 61" 1080p HD-ILA HDTV

Features

• True 1080p 2 Million Pixel Structure 3-Chip DILA System (1920x1080)
• ATSC/QAM and Digital CableCard Capable (Digital Cable Ready)
• 5th Generation D.I.S.T. 1080p (Digital Image Scaling Technology) + GENESSA Picture Processing
• Advanced Super Cinema Mode (Optical Iris System)
• Intelligent Noise Reduction Circuitry
• Contrast ratio of 10,000:1

We've talked about the JVC HD-ILA ( Buy Now )rear projection HDTVs for a long time. In fact way back in Episode 11, on June 9 of 2005, we picked a 720p JVC as our favorite in a shootout between JVC, Mitsubishi and Samsung. Those were the days. TV technology has come a long way since then, but JVC is still a very solid performer, and one of our favorites. In fact, Ara has mentioned that his brother has a couple of them. We finally got one in our HT Guys testing facility - also know as our family rooms - to test it out for ourselves. But would it live up to our expectations?

Out of the box the picture looks OK. There's a dedicated button on the remote called 'Theater Pro' it switched you over to the "Theater" mode, and away from the default "Dynamic" mode. This was a huge improvement and actually looked pretty good. It seemed to lean a little on the yellowy side, but after calibrating the TV, everything looked great. Black levels are what really set this TV apart from many others. It can produce some of the deepest blacks we've seen on a rear projection set, and the contrast ratio is stellar. No detail is ever lost in a dark scene; everything shows up with perfect detail. Which leads us to the actually clarity and detail in the picture. With HD content the TV looked perfect, DVDs looked as good as any other micro display we've used and standard definition held up pretty well. We weren't able to get the colors calibrated to 100% using just the user menu options, but it was very close. The green gave us a little trouble, but nothing a common viewer would ever notice.

As far as features go, the numerous inputs gave us the opportunity to plug in anything we wanted. It has built in NTSC/ATSC and QAM tuners as well as a cable card slot. The HDMI inputs are fully 1080p capable and it has a bunch of analog inputs that we didn't really play with that much. The set also has a digital audio output, so that if you're using an HDMI input and your receiver doesn't support HDMI, you can just pull the audio from the TV. Very convenient.

The remote is not very good and took a while to get used to. The factory remote doesn't offer any way to select a specific input, so you have to go the old-school route of scrolling though all of them to get to the right one. That can be solved with a good universal remote, but without it switching inpu...