Sony VPL-VW50 "Pearl" Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance-5

Posted on February 27, 2007 by Art Feierman

Sony VW50 Projector - Calibration, measurements

As always, all I do is set contrast and brightness, and do a grayscale balance of the "best mode". In addition, I have the color balance info for other presets.

Cinema mode: Out of the box, the Sony is way off - in the low to mid 7000K temperature range when it should be D65. Quick adjustments to Gain and Bias took this:

First, an important consideration - which is, where I had set up the Pearl for measurement, I inadvertantly had the zoom lens about 3/4 towards widest angle (in other words, almost the largest image I could project from that distance). With the 1.8:1 zoom, there is a dramatic drop off in brightness from wide angle to full telephoto. I normally try to set the zoom at the halfway point. With most DLP projectors -with their very narrow zoom ranges, the difference might only be 10% or so between the two maximum settings. With 1.8:1, we are looking at a potential drop from full wide angle to full telephoto of

100ire 7246 (white)
80ire 7356
50ire 7594
30ire 8072

To this:

100ire 6482 (white)
80ire 6448
50ire 6555
30ire 6668

- A drastic improvement!

To get those numbers here are the Gain and Bias settings I used:
Gain	Red = 5	Green = 0	Blue = -6
Bias	Red = 9	Green = 0	Blue = -6

Contrast adjusted to 83, brightness to 54 - but those two settings, are, to a degree, dependent on your screen. (Those were for my Firehawk G3)

I mentioned previously my "fix" to get better performance out of Dynamic mode, both in color balance and brightness. That was simple, select Dynamic, and for Color temp choose Custom 1 which boosts green by 30, (that did a nice job on color balance, though with a bit more work, you can fine tune). I also adjusted brightness and contrast as well.

Sony VW50 Projector - Image Noise

Clean! It performed extemely well on the new HQV 1080p test disk (beta). In watching, I never felt the need to turn on the Noise Reduction.

OK, almost done. Take a peak at the Warranty page (the only one less that only takes 30 seconds), and then on to the Summary info.