Sony’s VPL-FHZ55 brings forward a new technology that makes the home theatre projector a suddenly much more promising display solution, writes Stephen Dawson.

It is important to note that this projector is not designed for home theatre operation. It is an installation projector for commercial and presentation use. Nonetheless it is an important projector because it is very suggestive of one development path for home theatre projectors.

That is the use of blue laser technology to replace the usual Ultra High Pressure lamp employed by most projectors.

One alternative light source that has already appeared is the LED lamp. This has many virtues: long life, quick switch-on and high efficiency among them. But they tend, so far, to be incapable of matching conventional lamps for brightness.

This projector uses a blue laser and brightness isn’t any kind of a problem. It operates in two modes, delivering 4,000 lumens with the higher output setting and 3,000 in the economy mode. Yet it also offers 20,000 hours of lamp life (indeed, the warranty of five years or 12,000 hours includes the lamp), which is between five and ten times the life of a conventional lamp.

But if you know anything about lasers, you know that a single laser makes a terrible light source for a colour projector. Lasers produce ‘coherent’ light, which is light that is all travelling in the same direction and is of the same wavelength. In sensory terms, wavelength equals colour. And this one’s blue, not red or green.

What a projector lamp needs is all visible colours, which we also call ‘white’.

This projector generates white light from blue by shooting its blue laser at a phosphorous panel that is triggered into producing white light. From that point on it’s pretty much conventional three LCD panel projection technology.

Although, since this isn’t a home theatre projector, the three panels don’t offer precisely full high definition resolution, but a little more: UXGA, which is 1,920 by 1,200 pixels.

At the front the projector is a 1.6x zoom lens and installation-friendly horizontal and vertical lens shift. It also has an unusually extensive set of connections, unusually at the lens-end of the projector (Sony home theatre projectors typically have their connections on one side). The audio connections are essentially just for pass-through of sound, with the convenience that you can control the volume level with the projector’s remote. In a home theatre context this would be of no relevance.

Installation of the projector was easy thanks to the good range of adjustments in the optics. The only potential problem was that the centre of mass was right at the rear edge of the triangle formed by the three mounting points, so a universal-joint style mounting arrangement needs to be very tight to avoid drooping.

Picture Quality
Switch on was very fast, and full brightness was achieved as soon as the picture showed, but it defaulted to a Sony splash screen. This can be switched off.

Now I should be quite ambivalent about the picture quality of this projector. It is not a home theatre projector, so it lacks the layer upon layer of video processing that improves – or so we hope – the quality of the image. But in some ways that was actually an improvement.

Take, for example, an image from a test Blu-ray. This alternates pixels black, white, black, white in different sections of the screen. Many displays have trouble with this. It is, after all, a very strange image. So they sometimes smear the detail, and sometimes worse. Noise reduction algorithms can go quite spasmodic with this sometimes.

But this projector? It just projected it as though it were nothing different. Every single dot in the source picture was mapped perfectly onto the matching display pixel at Full HD. When delivered a 1080p signal, the projector doesn’t try to expand the picture somehow to match its native resolution. It sensibly just leaves off the 120 rows of pixels not required.

This same test pattern also exposes very well any misalignment between the three patterns. Even if one of the colours is only a few percent of a pixel width mismatched this shows up as a colour shift on this pattern. At a distance, the pattern was perfectly grey from corner to corner. The alignment was absolutely perfect.

I was startled to see that by default the ‘Sharpness’ control was on ‘50’ on a scale of ‘0’ to ‘100’, yet there didn’t appear to be any of the ‘ringing’ (i.e. harsh light or dark outlines around on-screen objects) that tends to mark most sharpness controls. A bit of experimenting revealed that this control is calibrated so that ‘50’ is no sharpening. Reducing it actually softens the picture, gradually merging adjacent pixels. Just leave it on ‘50’.

The scaling of the grey scale was almost perfect as well. The default ‘Standard’ picture mode had the ‘Contrast’ control about three notches too low at ‘80’. At that setting full video white was showing a little darker than ‘whiter than white’. (Not all the 16-bit number space is used for the video scale, so there is room above full white, and below full black, for more notional levels of brightness. But these don’t appear on regular discs, so the levels must be adjusted so that full white and full black extend to the maximums on offer from the display.)

The setting for the other end of the scale – black, adjusted by the ‘Brightness’ control – was correct. But by the standards of recent home theatre projectors, black levels were fairly modest. The projector has no dynamic iris or, really, strong concessions towards delivering deep blacks. A few years ago an 8,000:1 contrast ratio would have been okay, and is still pretty reasonable as a native measure. But it left the picture was markedly less pop and richness than a unit with much deeper blacks.

There’s an ‘Expert Setting’ in the menus called ‘Black Level Adj’, but this doesn’t change the native black levels, it merely adjusts the near black levels so that they tend to crush up a bit against black. This can deepen the subjective level of blacks in some scenes, but also tends to reduce the visibility of detail in dark scenes.

This was on an 84-inch screen with the lamp power set to the lower of the two levels. Darker blacks will be available on a larger screen, although whites will also be lower in level. But, basically, if you want deep blacks, this is not the projector for you.

Likewise, colours tended to be softer than the norm due to the lack of a solid black underpinning.

With not much in the way of video processing there was no motion smoothing (which is bit of a pity because Sony’s is probably the best in the field). If a scene on a disc has been shot in such a way as to show camera judder, you’re going to see it with this projector.

The projector accepted 1080p24 signals from Blu-ray of course, and also interlaced signals of various kinds. With both 576i50 and 1080i50 it applied motion adaptive deinterlacing, weaving the parts of the picture that were static while bobbing the moving parts. But it was not all that good at detecting film-sourced content, so if often bobbed stuff which it should have woven, even relatively easy to handle content. You will want to use a Blu-ray player with high quality progressive scan conversion.

The fan was louder than the norm for a home theatre projector (which this isn’t of course), and that was in the ‘Standard’ (i.e. low output) mode. When switched to ‘High’ it kicked up a gear and would be bothersome in most home theatre rooms. After a couple of hours of use in the lower output mode the projector was left only barely warmer than room temperature. The chances are the fan could be optimised for quiet operation and slightly higher temperature.

The Office
But all that isn’t what this projector is about… yet. This is a high quality, low maintenance, general purpose projector that would be particularly useful in commercial and office settings. It is very powerful so it can cope admirably with ambient light. And it has features such as edge blending which allow you to stitch together the output from two or more projectors together to create a reasonably seamless whole.

Conclusion
I couldn’t really recommend this projector for a home theatre system due to the weak black levels. Nonetheless it is an exciting development, since the light engine shall surely soon start appearing in Sony projectors optimised for this function, no doubt using its SXRD panels and various black level enhancements to provide an excellent home theatre performance combined with convenience and long life.