Cine4Home has had a chance to test the new Sony VPL-VW100 projector. From what I can make out, they tested a preproduction model, so things may change slightly. This is another SXRD offering from Sony, the same technology in their Qualia projectors and the Sony KDS-R60XBR1 and KDS-R50XBR1 rear-projection HDTVs that have won so many praises. Cine4Home’s review is in German, so I’ve used Google and my limited abilities to extract the best parts and add commentary.

First, they think that it has a nice build quality for a projector to be priced at €9990. Just looking at it lets you know there’s something special there. The great industrial design makes it look like it wants to float into your home theater room.

This is a 1080p projector, using three 1920 x 1080 SXRD 0.61″ panels. Not only that, it is one of the few projectors to accept 1080p signals, so this will be ready for your Blu-ray player or PS3.

Connection wise, that 1080p signal will come in through the the HDMI input. It also has a DVI input, a serial port, a network connection, and other video connections.

This projector uses a 400W Xenon lamp as its light source. This is quite unusual, and is both good and bad. Bad because they are expensive to replace, use more current, and create more heat. Good because they produce much more accurate light, mimicing sunlight a lot closer than traditional lamps. Out of the box this produces a grey-scale close to the 6500K standard. This results in more accurate colour on screen. The extra heat is taken care of with a special case design that disipates the heat quietly, making for a projector whose noice the reviewers barely noticed.

This projector has an adaptive iris. This is something that is starting to appear in projectors to better their contrast ratios. However, this Sony projector does things a little differently by putting the light-constricting mechanism at the end of the optic path instead of the beginning. (I think. Hard to translate.) “By the focusing on scattered light, instead of the light-current overall to ‘caps’, the iris is clearly stronger in its efficiency than other patents.”

This projector has a great 1.8x zoom lens that can create large images from relatively close. The lens shift feature is a must for easy placement of the projector, and it is motorized so that it can be operated remotely. Strangely, only the vertical lens shift operates this way. The horizontal lens shift must be adjusted with a screw driver, nor does it have as much room to adjust.

The remote isn’t all that great, and does not have direct access input buttons.

The SXRD panels used in this projector have a 90 - 92% fill rate, so any screen door effect is invisible from even a short distance. So no pixel structure can be seen from the sitting position, which is creates a smooth seamless image.

The Xenon lamp gives very accurate colours. I’ll just quote the translation here:

As the above measurements clearly show, all wavelengths of each color are almost equivalent in strength. Instead of narrow peaks, a broad bell form shows up. In the direct comparison to a UHP spectrum the difference becomes clear. [See pictures in review.] Clearly the advantages of the xenon lamp can be seen versus the typical UHP spectrum. [See pictures in review.] Many wavelengths (color nuances) are evenly represented. In contrast, look at the UHP spectrum, where only certain wavelengths show a “high excursion”. The peaks lie mostly in green but not in the rated range, but rather in the yellowish one. Additionally the basic colour distribution is evenly strong with xenon, the UHP’s lack of red is absent. These differences show up not only in measuring diagrams, but also in the film picture on the canvas. Hardly any other projector in our testing showed as strong and impressing colors as the Vpl-vw100. Particularly in animated films this impressive achievement showed clearly, the colors not being inferior to the cinema original at all. With respect to the colour accuracy of the projector, the technical designers’ priority becomes clear: maximum color utilization of xenon lamp.

The color area of the projector (white triangle) lies clearly over that of our PAL standard, in all three basic colours reaches the projector more, than it “must”, the Ruby jumps over itself here over the video standard. In film practice a so large color area saves however the risk that certain colors in the picture appear stronger and thus more unnatural, than it is intended. The large brother Quala004 offers the color mode “normal” for adherence to the video standard, which reduces and optimally to the video standard adapts the saturation of the basic colours. The Ruby does not offer this option, is available also here in the picture menu the color mode “normal”, but changes it the color area only in red noticeably. But altogether the color representation of the projector was outstanding, the advantages outweighs clearly in relation to the disadvantages. Field recordings and face colors do not work naturally and under any circumstances surfeited. Where strong color are in demand, they appeared on the canvas. Altogether hardly a projector approached as near to the colouring properties in the cinema, as the VW100 in our test.

The technical data for the projector predicted a contrast ratio of 3000:1 with an open iris, a ratio of 6000:1 with a more closed iries, and with an adaptive iris 15000:1. “This would be values, which are reached by no other home cinema projector, even not with DLP, at present.” This was confirmed by their test equipment: open iris gave them 3300:1, closed iris 6000:1. So even without the adaptive iris this is one of the best projectors for contrast ratio on the market. With an open iris, this means that you can have a display 3.5 meters wide. With a closed iris, 2.5 meters. The review then goes on to talk about how difficult it is to implement a dynamic iris with appropriate modification of gamma for the appropriate parts of the image. But they do come to a conclusion: What Sony achieved is astounding. “Even with difficult scenes with many bright/dark changes the function of the iris remains almost invisible. Dark scenes had astounding blackness, while bright scenes shone strong.” There was one case where the functionality lacked a little, and I couldn’t figure out exactly what they meant. There were work-arounds. But what was their measured contrast ratio with an adaptive iris? An astounding 17000:1 ! “The Sony Ruby is without a doubt at present the yardstick.”

Next I had a little trouble translating what they were saying. I think they said that the corners of the image were a little grayer than the middle when displaying a black picture. This can be noticable on very dark scenes in a movie. As soon as brighter objects appear in the scene, however, this effect is no longer noticable. Also, the convergence of the three SXRD panels was off by a tiny bit - the blue colour was off by a pixel.

In this projector the overscan is pretty high at 40 pixels on the left and right edges, but thankfully this can now be turned off, something new for Sony projectors.

Deinterlacing circuitry works well in the VPL-VW100, whether the source be video or film.

Three chip projectors always face the same problem: colour uniformity over the entire surface. The VPL-VW100 was good but not perfect. At the lower and lefthand side there was an small tendency to the red. This was noticable with test patterns but not in normal viewing. It should be noted that the SXRD Qualia projector did not have this problem. This can be corrected via calibration with a lot of patience (uh, I think!).

This projector really impressed the testers: there were no major weaknesses! They were first impressed by the great colour representation. Then they were impressed by the contrast ratio, which is among the best of any projector ever built. The level of detail is amazing due to the 1920 x 1080 resolution and lack of pixel structure. The lack of digital artifacts was amazing - no noise on dark scenes, no false contouring, no rainbow effect (of course, there’s no colour wheel!) etc.

I tried to clean up the translated conclusion as best I could:

With the Sony Qualia004 we had to begin our conclusion with the same words as today: there was never a projector that impressed us as much as the Sony VPL-VW100. It is unpleasant to us that the result reads as if it were as Sony company slogan, but it is a fact that the “Ruby” is in its total concept as close to perfection as any other projector. This refers not only to the image quality, but to almost all aspects: The projector is unusually well thought out in the design and high-quality of processing. At first sight one recognizes that it this is high end equipment here. Despite its unusual 400W lamp it is the at present the quietest projector on the market, a technical miracle, which was made possible by the ventilation with a compromiseless conception.

The outstanding impression continues with its feature list, which makes the projector compatible for horizontal/vertical kensshift by a large zoom shot range and nearly each cinema area. Complete motorizing of the optics is a luxury. Its remote for this price lass represents a clear disappointment, here Sony could have invested still a little more money. However this is offset by the clear and versatile menu options, the outstanding gamma often commodity and the network connection. The build quality, which we discussed already in detail and praised in the preceding chapter, does not require further words. With SXRD Sony has established in record time another home cinema reference technology to stand beside DLP and LCD, where the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. Admittedly, the Sony VPL-VW100 is not cheap and certainly not affordable for everyone with a price of €9990, but considering the outstanding equivalent in equipment and picture it offers nevertheless a price/perfomance relationship like hardly another equipment before. For us as testers it is anyhow amazing, what Sony did at this price point.

Cine4Home - Sony SXRD VPL-VW100 Projector
SonyStyle.ca - VPLVW100 $11,999.99 Cdn (in store only)