JVC RS-45 Uniformity

For a while now I've gone back and forth on the uniformity of my RS-45. At times it's seemed fine, at others it's annoyed me. I had an LCD a few years back that had pretty bad uniformity, and my RS-45 is certainly better than that. However, I have noticed when watching some black and white movies that the top 10-15% of the screen has a yellowish tint and the bottom 20-25% of the screen has a reddish tint. I used different sources to test uniformity; I tried calibrating it away; I tried repositioning my projector to minimize lens shift. None of these made much if any difference. I'm wondering what level of uniformity is considered acceptable, both by you guys and by (perhaps) JVC folk. I used the 100 IRE pattern located off the service menu to get the clearest idea of uniformity, and looking at it really makes me want to try to get a replacement. I've heard that uniformity is a bit of a crapshoot, and I'm hoping to roll the dice again and get a better score. Oh, metaphors. I've got to do something about this since I watch a fair number of black and white movies and I think that, if I do nothing, I'm going to end up watching them on my plasma (perfect uniformity). I'd honestly rather watch ANYTHING on my plasma than on this projector right now. It provides a great picture otherwise, and makes movies look miles more cinematic than anything I've seen before, but the uniformity is killing me.

coderguy,

Do you ever notice the lack of perfect brightness uniformity while watching something? I wonder because I'm not even sure how that would manifest itself. I've had projectors with shading problems, with banding, RBE, etc., but I'm not sure how suboptimal brightness uniformity shows up (if at all). My projector has "bright corners," and I notice that when the screen is entirely dark, but that's about it, and it doesn't really bother me at all.

Kelvin,

I tried what you describe and it does nothing, unfortunately.

All this leads me to believe that what I'm perceiving is a problem not related to brightness uniformity but shading and which affects only some units. I'm going to contact JVC the next couple days and see if they'll help me out. I've never heard of this being a fixable problem, so hopefully they'll get me a new unit.

John,

I also make a point of checking white field uniformity (shading) whenever I get a new tv/projector. I checked on this one as well, but I think two things kept me from noticing it at first. One is that, as I mentioned before, the shading on this projector is not as bad as it was on my LCD. I didn't see something like that, so I figured mine was fine. But more than anything I think the problem has to do with the fact that I checked this stuff when the projector was still warming up. When it's still warming up the problem is not nearly as noticeable as when it's been on a half hour, an hour, or more. It's not really even very noticeable at all in color films, it's only black and white films that are severely affected; unfortunately, I watch plenty of black and white films, so if I don't get this taken care of this will really drive me crazy. I imagine that some viewers wouldn't even perceive such a thing, but I'm very sensitive to this kind of thing.

I know everybody was waiting with bated breath to find out what came of my interactions with JVC. Well, it took me a while longer than expected to send it in, due to both an injury I suffered and some misunderstanding of how exactly the shipping would work. It got sent in mid-December, and it took over a month to get the projector back. I was surprised to see that they did repair it, trading out the old lamp and optical block. Another interesting thing is that the UPS guy did not need my signature to leave the item. I guess a $3000+ projector is just not expensive or tempting enough to require a signature! The projector now has very minimal uniformity problems (it seems slightly more yellow in the upper-right corner, but it's pretty slight), but I now have the "smeared text" problem, or whatever it's called, which I've read about on this forum. I actually had to return the first unit I got because it had this problem quite bad; the second one didn't have that problem but had pretty bad uniformity. Now they've replaced some parts in the second unit, but it has the first problem again (though less severe). So I've spent several months calibrating projectors and switching out units...all to get a projector with marginally fewer problems than I first had. Any thoughts on what I should do here? It is less visible than with the first unit (that one was VERY visible), but it's not exactly invisible, either. The major impact is that it causes text/fine lines to appear fuzzier than they should, which is especially noticeable if moving much closer at all than where I normally sit. Although JVC did try to fix the projector, it took over a month, and I don't look forward to waiting so long to have this problem taken care of. From what I've read about the projector on here, and from my own experience, this doesn't seem to be an either-or proposition. It seems possible to get units without any such problems, so I'm right now planning on getting a different unit/additional repair and making sure that whatever gets replaced has neither uniformity nor "smearing" problems. But I'd appreciate any input from you guys on what you think.