The Sony VPL-HW50ES is a solid, reliable projector, writes Stephen Dawson. Especially when it comes to 2D images.

For the past few years, Sony’s premium projectors have been based on what it calls ‘SXRD’ technology. That stands for Silicon X-tal Reflective Display, which is Sony’s version of Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) technology. The latest full HD incarnation appears in the mid-high priced VPL-HW50ES home theatre projector.

What it is
Standard LCD projectors shine their lamps through translucent panels, the pixels of which, obviously, change between somewhere near opaque and somewhere near transparent as required by the picture. The problem is that all the wiring to all those pixels (more than two million of them) has to run around the edges of the pixels so that the light can get through unimpeded. In addition there are limits to their opacity so really wide contrast ratios can be difficult to achieve.

LCoS (and SXRD) reflect the light, rather than passing it through, so in a sense they act like the digital micro-mirror devices in DLP projectors. But rather than packing millions of tiny mirrors that physically move, they are solid state, altering their reflectivity.

That means that the wiring is all behind the pixels, rather than around the edges. That in turn makes for almost no space between adjacent pixels. And that means no screen door effect. It is also easier with such a system to have a largish contrast ratio, although Sony uses a dynamic iris (which alters the amount of light it allows to pass according to a moment-by-moment analysis of the picture) to increase it further.

Sony says that the contrast ratio of the unit is an impressive 100,000:1 and that it can provide up to 1,700 lumens of brightness, both with whites and with colour.

The projector packs optics that provides a zoom range of 1.6:1, says Sony. This provides a fair bit of installation flexibility, as does the provision of both horizontal and vertical lens shift.

Unlike most projectors, which have their connections at the rear, Sony has them at the side. Composite and S-Video are not provided, although for problem solving you can plug Composite into the ‘Y’ component video input. There are two HDMI inputs.

The 3D is an active system whereby the left and right eye views are rapidly alternated. Two sets of shutter glasses are provided with the projector. These are charged by means of MicroUSB sockets and an IR sync signal is used. The transmitter for this is built into the projector, but a socket is provided to connect an external unit in case the synch does not work reliably in a particular setting.

Picture Quality
Installation was easy with this projector, with the lens shift and zoom being up to the task of getting the image from the projector, which was installed in standard position in my viewing room, up onto the screen.

I found it necessary to pick the picture content carefully in order to optimise focus. There’s a test pattern consisting of green lines on a black background which was serviceable, particularly for zoom and picture position, but for focus I like a broader range of colours. The problem was that in the near total absence of a screen door effect – clearly an actual virtue – it was hard to latch onto something with sufficient detail to prove the sharpness of the focus. In the end I found hard diagonal lines that had sufficiently sharp jaggies (I had to go close to screen to inspect these) to get it just so. Even in this condition, the picture remained super smooth, thanks to total lack of pixel boundaries.

When it came to 2D content, this projector was a lovely, lovely unit. The projector was nicely quiet. It was only after a week or two I thought to check the lamp level and found that it had defaulted to ‘High’. I switched it to ‘Low’ and the cooling fan kicked down to a lower level and became even quieter. The ‘Low’ setting was quite bright enough in my darkened viewing area for a rich and colourful experience, and had I owned the projector I would have had the advantage of extending the lamp life by 50% to 3,000 hours.

The black levels were remarkably deep – even more so when I turned down the projector’s brightness. When there was a fast fade to black, the result really was an extremely deep black. A home theatre projector like this simply kills anything you’re likely to see in a real cinema when it comes to contrast.

In part the excellent black levels were achieved by means of its dynamic iris, which adjusted according to the brightness level of the picture. This operated with complete silence, and gave no sense of pumping.

One of the main picture processing features of this projector is its full HD ‘Reality Creation’ engine. This is said to restore detail lost in image compression.

With real content Reality Creation did seem to yield a perceived increase in apparent sharpness without any obvious artefacts, but with high definition test patterns there was some spurious picture distortion generated: subtle little ghosts of some sections of the pattern. These were mild and far less damaging than many such picture improvement processes, but I felt perfectly happy with the picture with this switched off. Happier, in fact, because I knew that I didn’t have to be on the lookout for errors to the picture that may have been introduced by the process.

Sony’s Motionflow motion smoothing system is implemented on this projector as well. It has two settings: ‘Low’ and ‘High’, plus of course ‘Off’. The ‘High’ setting provided super smooth motion; so smooth it was distracting in a way. The ‘Low’ setting was almost artefact free, increased clarity and picture detail during movement and camera pans, yet didn’t seem to cast an unrealistic gloss onto the picture. As for those artefacts, I happened to be re-watching some episodes of the first season the original Star Trek TV series on Blu-ray, and there were a few occasions in which people moved in front of honeycomb-patterned wall decorations which became briefly fluid near the character boundaries.

3D
The 3D performance was good by today’s standards, but nonetheless far from the best. Currently leading the pack is DLP, which seems to achieve its nearly complete crosstalk free performance by means of the very fast switching time achieved by the display panels. Next are those projectors which use crosstalk cancellation – anticipating the leakage of one eye’s content into the other and providing a negative correction to that other eye’s image to cancel it out.

This projector did not appear to use such a system. Its native performance was reasonably good, though. In live action content the main ghosting was when brightly white objects were in a darker field. This was particularly the case with titles and such. For the most part it did not impact on the 3D effect, result in an impressive sense of depth.

In my office the 3D sync was highly reliable, bouncing its IR signal from the projection screen back to the two pairs of supplied 3D glasses. Yet it didn’t interfere significantly with the various IR remote controls I was using.

Conclusion
The Sony VPL-HW50ES is a fine home theatre projector, especially with 2D content. I’d probably look to DLP or a crosstalk cancellation projector if 3D was a very high priority, but even so most 3D looked good most of the time.