For people after a dedicated home theater projector, one name always comes up at the top of the list: JVC. Other companies like Sony and Mitsubishi might use similar technology in their projectors, but JVC can seemingly accomplish the impossible with their D-ILA technology. With no dynamic iris they manage darker blacks and better contrast ratios than anyone else. Other companies can come close, but still no one can touch them in this regard.

JVC has also been continually adding more and more features to their projectors as well. This past CEDIA they announced the JVC X55 projector. It falls right into the sweet-spot of their lineup. It has full lens memory, a color management system (CMS), and their e-Shift scaling system for a list price of $5,000. It isn’t cheap, but compared to what most vendors sell for that price its a veritable bargain.

Spending a couple of months with it for Secrets of Home Theater, I found it to live up to their past models but with a couple caveats. The light output didn’t approach that of the Sony VPL-HW50ES that remains my favorite projector, and the fan during high lamp mode is very noisy. Those two issues will only be a problem if you have a very large screen with a gain below 2.0, or watch a lot of 3D. For traditional 2D movies on a regular projection screen, it might be impossible to beat.

The full review is up now at Secrets of Home Theater. It goes into far greater depth about the performance of the projector and the full suite of bench tests. If you’re after a projector and care most about 2D performance, you really do need to see a JVC in action to see what it is capable of.