Jvc Hd 56ZR7 Hdtv Television

The first thing that attracted us to the HD-56ZR7 was the lack of a tacky looking silver surround. It has a slither of silver on both sides and a bigger chunk across the bottom with speakers situated on both sides, breaking it up and improving it visually. It’s less than 5cm deep keeping it nice and slender and very attractive.

The award for the TV with the most connections goes to the superb, the terrific, the one and only HD-56ZR7J. The search for a TV with a decent amount of connections is finally over, with this TV you get a HDMI jack (we would have preferred two), a composite video input, an S-Video input, PC input, headphone jack and to save the best till last, not one, not two, but three scarts, two being RGB-enabled, whit-whoo. JVC obviously believe that good processors are the future, but they’ve modestly hidden another 3 under the name D-ILA. They include: DynaPix picture processing, DIST for better fine detailing and scaling and Super DigiPure for more adaptive contrast reproduction. Okay, that’s the good stuff out of the way, one massive pitfall is that the HD-56ZR7 doesn’t come with a digital tuner - and why ever not is what we want to know, come on JVC, there really is no excuse. Let’s just hope you’ve got Sky fall back on.

When it comes to seeing the HD-56ZR7J in action you’ll realise it’s potential. It gives nothing short of a sensational performance handling motion extremely well. Perfect black levels make pictures clear and crisp alongside great fine detailing. It produces awesome pictures with both SD and HD but the latter is just out of this world, producing some of the most radiant colours we have ever seen. For a back-projector it produces wickedly high brightness levels thanks to the D-ILA system, providing better colour ranges than you would get from any LCD screen. One thing we will warn you about is the high or auto settings, they can create a bit of undesirable noise here and there. Whatever you do, don’t settle for the default settings, play around to find a good level. Equally as good as the picture performance is the audio. The Nicam stereo pumps out a ridiculous amount of sound, with good bass and extremely clear dialogue, without any sign of distortion.

Whack a digital tuner in there and we would call it perfect. We take our hats off to JVC for taking the plunge with their new technology and testing it out in this superb back projector. The JVC HD-56ZR7J looks, behaves and probably tastes good - it’s a real winner.