JVC DLA-HD990

JVC DLA-HD990 review

To say the JVC DLA-HD950 projector is a tough act to follow is like saying The Grand Canyon is quite big. The lightbox coasted to victory as Best Projector in our recent Home Cinema Choice annual product awards, and refines the brand's already outstanding, proprietary LCOS-based D-ILA projection technology to deliver truly jaw-dropping pictures. Remarkably, however, the HD950 is not the pinnacle of JVC's current projection range; nestled above it is the HD990. The similarities between the two models suggest that the HD990 is only an incremental improvement on the HD950. Yet the price gap is a rather non-incremental £3.5K. So clearly we will be focusing on whether the HD990 is sufficiently better to justify such a price hike. We asked JVC's product specialist manager, Steven Carter, to give us JVC's own take on the HD990. For a start, why bother with it? "Because we could", says Steven. "We were going through the selection process for the HD950's components, and we could see that the top 2 per cent of the optical systems we were producing were delivering amazing quality.