Well
I managed to finagle Alan to give me his Pearl for review
purposes. It wasn’t easy either. 
Anyways, I headed over to his place, full of excitement and
anticipation. I got there and grabbed the box, which was hefty
to say the least. It’s not all that big, but there is
some weight to it for sure. Then I rushed home so that I could
start playing!
For those who are unfamiliar with this unit…read the
AVSforum! J Just kidding. This is Sony’s new SXRD front
projector that retails for an amazing $4999! It is a 3 chip
design, with 1920x1080 per chip resolution. The unit is the
younger brother of the VPL-VW100 “Ruby”, and it
differs in several ways. One way is the lamp…the “Pearl”
is a 200 watt UHP as opposed to the 400 watt Xenon in the
“Ruby”. Though the power is lower, the Pearl actually
puts out very good brightness, and the advantage of the UHP
lamp is cost and total runtime. They run longer and cost less/hour
to run. Another difference is that the “Pearl”
also uses a less powerful video processor inside (more on
that later). The unit comes with the full gamut of inputs,
including 2 HDMI. All the inputs are located on the side of
the unit which is sort of unusual, but it allows someone to
back the unit closer to a wall if needed. The remote is well
laid out, with plenty of space between the buttons-a pro for
those like me with big fingers. There were not a lot of buttons
on the remote which is unusual. The way it works is you press
a button to access sub-menus and toggle through them. The
only problem I saw with this is the input selector. I saw
no direct access buttons for the various inputs (although
there may be codes out there for download). This could prove
to be a tad difficult for those using master controllers with
macros.
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I opened up the box and the first thing I saw was no double
box. Bummer…you know I love it when expensive pieces
are double boxed. But, I will say it was very well packed
inside. In fact I would say there was a solid 3”+ around
all sides of the projector, in the form of soft foam. In addition,
the top had a cardboard accessory “tray” that
held the manual, cord, remote, etc… I took out the remote
and projector and placed it into my room. Due to my test HDMI
cable being faulty, I ended up having to mount the unit onto
my ceiling to do the review. Extra work, but maybe that will
make me decide to keep it there (sorry Alan
). First observations…it is sexy. It actually looks
similar to the “Ruby”, just a tad smaller. It
has a very sleek metallic silverish color, with dark charcoal
trim and accents. The lens is centered on the unit, which
makes installation a bit easier for DIYers. Anyways, I got
it hooked up and turned it on. The unit has a fully motorized
lens system, which consists of the zoom, focus and lens shift.
This is a nice feature as you can get up closer to the screen
to adjust it and make sure everything is just right. Also,
when you press the lens button and bring up the various adjustments,
it actually changes to a test pattern automatically. This
is nice for checking geometry, but I actually found it a bit
cumbersome for doing zoom. Why? Well the test pattern didn’t
necessarily line up with my image, so I kept having to zoom,
exit and check, zoom, exit and check, etc…until I got
the image lined up on my screen border. I found it a tad annoying.
I also found that there was a lag time on the adjustment.
What would happen is I would bring up the zoom, for instance,
and when I would press the up or down button, nothing would
happen. I had to actually hold the button down for about 1
second before it did anything. The tricky part of that is
for the finer measurements, I had to sit there and try to
time it. I would have liked to been able to just tap the button
and have it move a tiny amount. Moving on, I brought up the
standard test via my generator, and did a quick setup (usual
brightness, contrast, etc…). I then did a D65 calibration,
and adjusted the dynamic iris settings, lamp settings, gamma,
etc… One thing to note, the unit has a lot of adjustments
for you “tweakers”. In fact, the majority of the
settings you need to adjust it are in the user menu. However,
I did many of them in the service menu as to globalize them.
In true Sony fashion, the “Pearl”
was leaning towards the blue. I had to decrease both the gain
and bias adjustments for blue, and raise the red to get it
to true D65. Once that was done, I rechecked all my other
settings and took some measurements. Everything was spot on.
Since the Sony has the RCP color feature (this allows adjustments
of the primary and secondary colors), I decided to check on
those. The primaries were all oversaturated so I did have
to adjust them down a bit to get them as close to perfect
as possible. This actually helped take a redish tinge I was
seeing in flesh-tones out of the image. I found the unit surprisingly
bright. I actually tested it (on a 100” 16:9 screen)
at about 26.8 foot-candles in high brightness mode. I suppose
I should mention a foot-candle is the measurement of light
before the screen. Foot-lamberts, which is more commonly used,
is after the screen reflection. So, assuming a 1.0 gain uniform
screen, 26.9 foot-candles = 26.9 foot-lamberts. Yes, it is
bright (remember a typical movie theater is about 12-16 foot-lamberts).
I should also mention that in my Cedia post, I stated that
the brightness I saw at the show was not all that great. Obviously,
as I said before, the Cedia setup was not ideal because this
test unit is showing a much more vibrant image here. Oh, these
measurements were taken at the short end of the throw. Moving
on. I measured the contrast on the unit as well. With the
DI set to Auto 1, I got about 8600:1 On/Off in low lamp mode...very
impressive. Say what you will about the pros and cons of a
DI, it definitely does do what it is supposed to…increase
on/off contrast. I also measured the ANSI contrast. This was
a bit low as compared to some other units I have tested. It
was about 224:1. This is still not terrible, but considering
some units test out in the 500-600:1 range, I wanted it to
be higher. I guess you can’t have everything!
I did also take measurements with DI turned off, but they
are all listed below. The unit, as implied before, has 2 lamp
settings, low and high. The fan noise when in low mode was
extremely quiet, rivaling the quietest units on the market.
The high mode is slightly louder but not by any means distracting.
One thing to note is that when you switch from low to high,
the fan does not instantly increase. Rather it slowly ramps
up. I only make mention of this such that you don’t
get alarmed if you switch.
Onto the fun stuff…the image. Beautiful.
The
unit is WAY better than what I saw at Cedia. In fact, I was
very surprised. I knew on paper that it should be great, but
I have to be honest in that I left Cedia with a less than
great impression. In a nutshell, setup is everything. I did
not feed any external processor to it as to make sure I was
only dealing with the Sony’s capabilities. I fed HD
DVD and standard DVD into it. The first thing I noticed was
the smoothness. Anyone who has seen the SXRD technology knows
this is a very big part of the look. The best way to describe
it is “filmlike”. This is great for you CRT converts
who are making the jump to digital. The colors were very nice
as well…rich and saturated. I found that there was a
slight redish tinge at first as I mentioned before, but I
was able to play with the RCP adjustments and fix that. However,
in order to get the primaries correct, I had to decrease the
saturation of each. This became apparent on content, but not
through the test patterns. It took some fiddling to get the
primary/secondary and color saturation balanced properly.
Contrast, as the measurements suggest, was extremely good.
There was a lot of depth in the black levels of the image,
but the unit was able to resolve the shadow detail as well.
This is another pro of the SXRD technology. I messed with
the various gamma settings. Depending on the source, I often
found that the “off” setting was best. There was
no user adjustment for adjusting the gamma level (ie. 2.2,
2.5, etc…). However in the service menu there was a
global adjustment ability. I did play a bit with that, but
reset it to factory as this is not my unit to keep. The
various DI adjustments were quiet different. I preferred the
Auto 1 setting for most of the test material. I will mention
that the response time seemed very quick as I didn’t
notice too much of the DI lag time. In fact, the only thing
I found a bit difficult to get used to was the “crispness”
(best way I can describe it). When looking at some of the
1080p DLP’s, they tended to be extremely sharp on the
edges. The Sony lacked a bit in that (lending to the “filmlike”
look). I don’t mean to say this is a bad thing, it is
just a different look. I mainly had some issue with it since
I was directly coming from a DLP, and it was very different.
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Conclusion
The simple fact is technology is changing…for the better.
Projectors are getting better and better, for less and less
money. And the best part is the sources are improving as well,
allowing us to take advantage of the projectors fullest capabilities.
The Sony represents a HUGE value in the HT market. At a $4999
MSRP, the unit offers significant performance, rivaling that
of units costing much more. It’s hard to believe how
far we have come in this area, but Sony has continued to represent
what people are looking for…more performance for less
money. If you are looking at getting into front projection,
you owe it to yourself to check out this unit. Arguably in
this price range, it is the benchmark for which all others
will have to compare.
Thanks! |
