For SDR input, the GV50’s menus offer five predefined picture modes that don’t allow any customization, plus a Custom mode that lets you adjust contrast, saturation, sharpness, hue, and color gain. Notably missing is a traditional brightness setting for adjusting black level. Based on my preliminary testing, I chose Custom mode, which was essentially tied with some of the others for second-brightest but allowed me to adjust the blue gain downward to remove a slight blue shift.
After my adjustment, the GV50 delivered an eminently watchable picture, with nicely saturated neutral color, for scenes dominated by midtones or bright levels. However, the darkest scenes in our test clips showed significant loss of shadow detail, to the point where I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell what was happening in those areas if I weren’t already so familiar with them. Keep in mind that most movies have few scenes as dark as we pick out for testing, and many don’t have any scenes that dark, so this is only a minor issue overall.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
For HDR input, the projector switches to an HDR menu that offers essentially the same list of predefined modes as the SDR menu, but with “HDR” tacked onto the names.
Here again, I chose Custom and adjusted the blue gain down, though the blue shift was more subtle in HDR than in SDR. In my viewing tests of the scenes we looked at, using both SDR and HDR discs of the same movies, the overall brightness of clips dominated by midtones and brighter levels was slightly darker in the HDR versions, as is common with projectors that support HDR. However, dark scenes were brighter overall for the HDR versions, and the shadow detail was far better. Color quality and contrast for all but the darkest scenes were essentially the same as for SDR. In short, the GV50 handles SDR reasonably well, but it does better with HDR.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
For both SDR and HDR, I saw fewer red/green/blue flashes, known as rainbow artifacts, than with many current DLP models. You may be more sensitive to them than I am, however, so if you’re concerned about seeing them, be sure to buy from a dealer that will accept returns without a charge, just in case.
If you’re a fan of 3D, note that the GV50 doesn’t support it. On the other hand, all but the most serious gamers will be happy with the input lag, which is easily short enough for casual gamers. My Bodnar 4K Lag Tester measured it at 22.3 milliseconds for 60Hz input, for both 1080p and 4K.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Keep in mind that the 500 ANSI lumen rating applies to the projector’s maximum brightness, which shows a noticeable green shift. For the settings I used, the brightness was close to what I expect from roughly 350 to 375 lumens, which translates to watchable in a dark room on a 90-inch, 16:9 diagonal image, but a little dim for my taste. I settled on a 78-inch diagonal size for comfortable viewing in a dark room. At that size, it was still watchable, if a little washed out, with a single floor lamp turned on to approximate a low level of ambient light.
