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Sony VPL-HW40ES Home Theater Projector - Hardware Tour 3

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Art Feierman
SONY VPL-HW40ES PROJECTOR - HARDWARE TOUR PAGE 3: Menus

Sony HW40ES Menus

Rather than long descriptive paragraphs, for our discussion of menus, I have added captions to a number of the menu photos in this player.  Many of these menus are self explanatory, and the features on some others are discussed elsewhere.

VPL-HW40ES Menus

Main Picture Menu

Very similar to other Sony's main menus. It's the sub-menus that have less features

Color Modes

Sony provides a wide range of pre-set picture modes

Reality Creation

This is Sony's dynamic detail enhancement feature , it's very effective

Reality Creation Adjustments

From minimum to 100. We found 20 is normally the default and fine for most, but increases image noise.

Motion Enhancer Menu

This comes up when selecting MotionFlow on main menu, for CFI.

Limited Pre-set Color Temps

Four fixed settings, plus Custom 5 is far less than the HW55ES. Only "5" can be customized

Adjusting Color Temp

This menu has the usual grayscale adjustments of Gain and Bias for R, G, and B.

RCP houses the CMS

From this menu, you can select, then calibrate each primary and secondary color separately

CMS Adjustment

This sub-menu allows separate fine tuning of settings for R, G, B, C, M, and Y - primary and secondary colors

Picture - Expert Settings

Noise Reduction, Contrast Enhancement, and most importantly Color Space - BT.709 almost perfect

Screen Menu

Allows adjustment of Aspect Ratio and also allows engaging Overscan

Setup Menu

Less features here, for example only two placement locations for menus - Center, lower left

Installation Menu

Offers Image Flip (for ceiling mounting), and importantly, Panel Alignment

Basic Info menu

Early production unit - number 12. Info, surprisingly doesn't show firmware version number

Color Space

Three other options, but BT.709 is virtually dead on, so look no further

Menus - Comments

Sony has a very good, and intuitive menu system.  And it's very familiar if you've previously worked with other Sony projectors.

The primary difference between the menus on the HW40ES and its big brother, the HW55ES is not the layout, but rather what's in the sub-menus.

There are many elements - mostly "luxuries" that can be found on the HW55ES but not the 40ES.

Typical are differences like these:

  • HW40ES only has two menu positions, less cosmetic adjustments
  • HW40ES has only one Custom gamma instead of many
  • HW40ES - no iris controls, because there's no iris
  • HW40ES - Fewer Color Temp options

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