Sony VPL-VW60 Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance-5

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Art Feierman

Once again notice the steady shift towards blue as the grays get darker.

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Ideally, I would have created a second set of custom color settings, adjusting Bias and Gain, but I found these settings, while just a trifle warm and shifting from white to black, to be more than adequate.

That brings us to Dynamic mode. Theoretically this is the brightest mode, and one where we tolerate some non-realistic colors in exchange for the horsepower to cut through a bit too much ambient light.

Like the Standard mode, Dynamic, which defauts to High on Color Temp, is too cool (shifted towards blue), but it takes that shift to almost new levels, with even white measuring 10,275K, and rising from there to 11,670, by the time I got down to 30 IRE.

Once again, though, the simple fix was to reset Color Temp to Low. This resulted in white (100 IRE: 7039) and the gray scale settings to all measure similarly to our adjusted Standard mode. Dynamic mode was just a little strong on greens, unlike Standard mode where greens were just about dead on.

Switching the Color Temp (for Dynamic mode) to Low did exact a price in terms of brightness, with a drop of almost 10%, as indicated in the lumens measurements listed in the Projector Brightness section above.

What we have here is a projector that does not perform well out of the box, but once properly set up produces excellent grayscale and color balance in Cinema mode. Settings for TV/HDTV/Sports viewing can be easily compensated for, by using the Low setting for each, however that is an acceptable solution, not an ideal one. Better to have a custom setting created for Standard at least, and one can probably get a slightly brighter, usable, and punchy image out of Dynamic with some tweaking as well.

VW60 Image Noise

The Sony VPL-VW60 demonstrated no problems in terms of jaggies, background noise or motion artifacts that would be considered a problem. I used the HQV 1080 test disk and observed more than satisfactory results. I did notice on occasion, during normal viewing, what might be a little bit greater than typical background noise, however, I did not run the Noise Reduction filter. The background noise was detected in my testing room, where I often view the screen closer than one would normally consider typical viewing distance.