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The Short Form
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| $7,999 / SONYSTYLE.COM / 877-865-SONY |
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Snapshot
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| A big, bold, brash 1080p projector that offers plenty of adjustment options and puts out an intensely bright, contrasty, colorful picture |
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Plus
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| • Videophiles will love the dazzling picture • Audiophiles will love the nearly inaudible fan • Star Trek-philes will love the motorized lens door |
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Minus
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| • Installers will love charging you for calibration |
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Key Features
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• 1080p resolution • 1.6x zoom lens • Accepts 1080p/24 input signals • Motorized zoom, focus, and lens shift • Anamorphic zoom mode for constant-height lenses • Automatic lens cover • Inputs: 2 HDMI, VGA; component-, composite-, and S-video; RS-232C, 3.5mm jacks (for screen and lens-sled trigger) •7 1/8 x 19 x 18 5/8 in, 26½ lb |
Projectors also offer more to excite the left cerebral hemisphere. Only recently, most models struggled to deliver adequate contrast and to deal with the high resolution of HDTV. Now some of the latest models exceed the needs of the average buyer as flamboyantly as a Ferrari does.
Sony's industrial-design team even threw in a gratuitous "wow" feature: an automatic two-piece lens cover that slides open when you power up the projector and closes when you cut the juice. But in a shocking design oversight, Sony didn't consider the sound of the door; it emits only a plasticky clunk. Enzo Ferrari never let his doors clunk.
But let's forget about sports cars for a moment and take a look at the VPL-VW70's technical particulars. It uses three of Sony's SXRD (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display) chips, so it doesn't suffer the color fringing you can see in single-chip DLP projectors. And it offers a complete complement of inputs.
One neat feature, unusual at this price point, is compatibility with anamorphic 2.35:1 motorized lenses. Lots of projectors have the internal image processing necessary to work with these lenses, which let you fill an extra-wide screen for a CinemaScope effect. The VPL-VW70 adds a trigger output for a motorized lens sled, so the lens moves into place automatically when the anamorphic zoom mode is activated. Sony doesn't sell such a lens, but the lens/sled combo is available from such companies as Panamorph starting at around $3,000.
The VPL-VW70 offers more adjustments and tweaks than Ferrari's F1 cars. All the must-have stuff like gain and bias adjustment for red, green, and blue is there. But you also get exotic goodies, like manual iris adjustment (which lets you stop down the projector's light output to improve contrast). It also has Sony's Real Color Processing (RCP), which lets you fine-tune the saturation and hue of the three primary and three secondary colors to a degree I haven't seen before.
The remote control is an installer's dream. It has so many dedicated buttons -- even for such functions as sharpness and gamma -- that the menu system seems almost superfluous. Because of these dedicated buttons, any adjustment takes only seconds. Controls behind a door on the side offer full access to the on-screen menus.
SETUP
It's easy to get a decent-looking picture out of the VPL-VW70. Just put it on a table or shelf or hang it from the ceiling and use the motorized lens-shift and zoom controls to fill your screen. A dedicated lens button on the remote accesses these functions instantly.
All of the VPL-VW70's controls and inputs are on the left side (if you're looking at the lens) rather than on the back, as with most projectors. That posed no problem for me, but it could be an issue if the VPL-VW70 is replacing an older projector with rear-mounted inputs.
A quick run-through with some test patterns told me the projector delivers the most accurate picture in its Cinema mode. But I noticed a reddish-brown cast in this mode, which turned out to be the result of a color temperature calibrated to an average of 5,964 Kelvin. That's not bad, but it's noticeably below the industry standard of 6,500 Kelvin. About 20 minutes of playing around with the gain and bias controls for red, green, and blue gave me consistent color response averaging 6,511 Kelvin -- or pretty darned near perfect.
The accuracy of blue and green left a bit to be desired, but the RCP color (saturation) controls let me fix this problem, too. Note that these controls demand a skilled hand. They're not particularly intuitive, and you could screw up the picture pretty badly when making adjustments. Also, you need special test equipment to set them correctly.
The one calibration control I struggled with was gamma. The gamma settings are arbitrarily labeled -- Gamma 1, Gamma 2, and so on -- and the descriptions of these settings in the manual are cryptic. I simply chose the gamma setting that looked best to me (a tossup between Gamma 3 and Gamma 4).
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PERFORMANCE
Watching the VPL-VW70 deliver its first image after it warms up is like tapping the gas pedal of a Ferrari for the first time: You're just blown away by the raw power.
A few chapters from such old favorites as The Fifth Element and Ratatouille revealed lush (but never cartoonish) color, intense (but never overblown) contrast, and deep (but never overly opaque) blacks. The contrast lent the image incredible depth; in certain scenes, the image took on an almost 3-D quality.
I got the biggest thrill from the VPL-VW70 when I put on Coma, a Blu-ray Disc that was glued into the pages of a tech magazine I bought. This isn't the 1978 medical thriller; it's a gangster pic starring Michael Madsen and George Hamilton. It won't win any awards for script or acting, but its unique visuals grabbed me. The blacks are super-deep, the whites are blown out, and there's not much in between. What little color there is looks as saturated as Colgate toothpaste. Playing this fast-moving, dense visual content through the VPL-VW70 was like putting a Ferrari on a twisty mountain pass -- it let the projector show off everything it can do. I wasn't able to follow the plot, but the image was so dazzling that I couldn't stop watching.
More mundane material from test DVDs revealed that the projector's internal video processing is fully up to date. Whether I was playing standard-def material, high-def TV programs, or 1080p images from Blu-ray Discs, everything looked great.
Much as I enjoyed the VPL-VW70's picture, I enjoyed its sound even more. Or perhaps I should say its lack of sound -- it's the quietest projector I've encountered. In low-lamp mode, it sounds like a soft breath coming from a wide-open mouth.
BOTTOM LINE
Many of today's projectors are like Hondas: You just power them up and they give you performance that's hard to complain about. The VPL-VW70, though, has more in common with a Ferrari. With a little patience and (preferably) professional tuning, it'll deliver a picture that might redefine your expectations of what a video projector can do.
TEST BENCH
Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard
Color |
Target X |
Measured X |
Target Y |
Measured Y |
Red |
0.64 |
0.67 |
0.33 |
0.33 |
Green |
0.30 |
0.29 |
0.60 |
0.69 |
Blue |
0.15 |
0.14 |
0.06 |
0.05 |
The VPL-VW70’s Cinema picture preset delivered the most accurate color reproduction. Grayscale tracking before calibration averaged 536 degrees below the 6,500 K standard from 30 to 100 IRE, which is OK for an out-of-the-box projector, but it did result in a mild reddish-brown cast. It’s worth noting, though, that the tracking at factory settings was nearly perfect, varying just +/-46 degrees from the average of 5,964 K. Adjustments made to the red, green, and blue gain and bias controls shifted the grayscale to 6,500 K, +/-77 degrees, from 30 to 100 IRE — again with excellent tracking. The tight tracking makes this projector easier to calibrate than most. Once adjusted to be as close as possible to 6,500 degrees at 30 and 80 IRE, it needed no further tweaking.
Color decoder tests through the HDMI inputs revealed that red, green, and blue were all about 2% low. The accuracy seemed slightly better from the component input, with blue still down a percent or two but red and green looking spot-on. As compared to the SMPTE HD specification for digital TV colors, the set’s green and blue primary color points were a little off at the factory settings (which are shown in the chart), but adjustment of the RCP controls brought the color points as close to perfect as possible.
The VPL-VW70 offers three iris modes (auto, off, and manual) as well as high and low lamp modes. No matter which mode is selected, the projector delivers excellent contrast. After calibration, the native contrast ratio (measured on a checkerboard pattern to eliminate the advantage of the iris) measured 3,094:1. With full-field 100 IRE and 0 IRE patterns, the contrast radio of the calibrated projector measured 10,930:1 with the iris deactivated and 23,490:1 with the iris activated. Black levels were excellent in low lamp mode, and very good in high lamp mode.
Overscan measured 0% for 1080i/p-format high-definition signals with the overscan switched off; with overscan activated, it measured about 2.8%. The VPL-VW70 displayed 1080i/p and 720p test patterns with full resolution on both the HDMI and component-video connections.
Brightness uniformity was excellent on a white field. On a black field, it was good except for a slightly brighter area in the upper left corner of the screen. This problem was subtle in the low lamp mode but more noticeable in the high lamp mode. Color variations across the screen were negligible in all modes.
A crosshatch pattern showed a slight convergence error on blue, producing just a trace of blue fringe at the bottom of bright white lines against a dark background. However, the projector’s panel shift feature allowed us to fix this problem easily and achieve visibly perfect convergence.
The projector passed all the standard-definition upconversion tests contained on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark DVD test disc, detecting 2:3 pulldown almost instantly and delivering excellent detail. The tests on the HQV Benchmark Blu-ray disc also proved no problem for the projector — especially the “jaggies” tests, on which it delivered supremely smooth diagonal lines and curves. The projector offers three levels of noise reduction plus an off setting; the noise reduction was fairly effective at the lowest setting without noticeably reducing detail, but two highest settings reduced detail substantially.