When I reviewed Sony's VPL-VW50 "Pearl" front projector in January 2007, I was mightily impressed with how the company had brought the benefits of its then high-end 1080p-rez SXRD technology (Sony's version of Liquid Crystal on Silicon) to a product with a $4,999 price point. Hot on the Pearl's heels, Sony has rolled out an updated version, the VPL-VW60. But with a handful of new 1080p LCD and DLP front projectors now moving for well under three grand, Sony's willingness to retain the VW50's $4,999 price suggests that the company may have an ace up its sleeve. Let's have a peek.

The VPL-VW60 (codename: Black Pearl) basically looks the same as Sony's earlier model, with a gently curved, all-black case. Both a set of control buttons and a row of video inputs are located on one side of the projector. A number of features ease installation, including motorized zoom and focus and vertical lens shift. As with the VW50, there are two Automatic Iris settings along with a manual iris adjustment to modify the amount of light entering the lens (with the end goal of achieving deeper blacks and improving overall picture contrast). Sony gives 3,000 hours as the life expectancy of the VW60's 200-watt UHP lamp in Low brightness mode.

The projector's inputs include two HDMI jacks, along with VGA, component video, and composite/S-video. There's also an RS-232 port for control. The VW60 will accept 1080p/24 input signals from a Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD player via HDMI. When doing so, it displays the signals at a 96-Hz refresh rate (a direct multiple of 24) as opposed to the standard 60 Hz, to eliminate any ill effects of 2:3 pulldown processing.

The projector's remote sports an exceptional design: It's free of superfluous controls, while including important buttons like brightness, contrast, and iris. My only gripe was its lack of direct-input keys for quickly switching sources. Display (or aspect ratio) modes on the VW60 include Normal (4:3), Full (16:9), Zoom, and Wide Zoom, with all modes accessible for both standard and high-def programs.

Setup I positioned the Sony about 13 feet away from an 80-inch-wide (92-inch-diagonal) Stewart Filmscreen Grayhawk RS screen in a medium-gray room darkened by blackout blinds. The VW60 put out an impressively bright image in this setting in its bulb-conserving Low lamp mode, which generates nearly inaudible fan noise compared with that of many other projectors, so that's what I used. I also tapped the Panel Alignment feature to eliminate a bit of color fringing that resulted from slight misalignment of the red, green, and blue SXRD imaging chips.

The projector's native contrast ratio was dramatically improved over that of last year's VW50 - an impression confirmed by measurements. Accordingly, I didn't even have to engage the VW60's iris to get a deep shade of black on the screen. There are three picture presets (Dynamic, Standard, and Cinema) and three User settings, all of which can be customized, with the projector storing your adjustments. Initially, I selected the Cinema preset with Low color temperature and Normal color space. Additional settings like Black Level adjust and Gamma Correction were left off, but I did experiment with the RCP (Real Color Processing) feature.

Performance Given my positive impressions of the Sony's native contrast on test patterns, I was eager to pop in the recently released Blu-ray Disc of Stanley Kubrick's classic film of 2001: A Space Odyssey to see how the projector would handle outer space. As I watched the Jupiter Mission ship moving through the void, blacks were deep, while the masses of white stars also looked punchy and bright. These dark images also benefited from the Auto 1 Iris mode, which had the effect of further deepening blacks while simultaneously punching up white highlights.

For more standard shots - either bright ones or those with a mix of bright and dark areas - I found the Sony's Iris modes to be mostly unnecessary. In an early scene from 2001 where apes huddle under a rock outcropping in a cave, for example, shadows looked deep, and I could clearly see the texture of their dark fur and leathery black faces in the mostly dark shot. The projector's picture detail was also very crisp: In another scene where apes loiter in a desert among animal bones, fine details in the background rocks and foreground vegetation really stood out.

The Sony's color rendition also proved mostly accurate, with challenging colors like red looking natural as opposed to overly rich and flat. In a space-station scene where Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) encounters a group of Russian colleagues, both the mod, futuristic red couches lining the all-white corridor and a purple dress worn by one of the women looked vivid, yet they were entirely balanced with other visual elements in the shot. Skin tones of the actors in this scene and those in other programs I watched looked natural, although I did sometimes see a yellowish tint to faces, which my picture calibrations failed to remove. This slightly jaundiced tint also extended to shots with green content like background grass and trees, although in that situation the projector's RCP adjustments helped to compensate for the imbalance.

One criticism I had of the VPL-VW50 last year was poor screen uniformity. There was a purplish tint to black-and-white movies that was sometimes visible on color programs, too. The VW60 revealed no such problem: It delivered even brightness and uniform colors across all parts of the screen. The new Sony also did a great job upconverting standard-def programs, which came across relatively sharp and clear.

Bottom Line Sony's new entry-level SXRD projector hits the bull's-eye on many levels. Its native contrast is a big improvement over that of last year's model; on this alone, it leaves much of the budget DLP and LCD competition in the dust. Other high points include effective Iris modes, low fan noise, exceptional setup flexibility, and (mostly) accurate color. That's a lot of pluses for one review, enough to earn the VW60 a strong recommendation. It seems that Sony had an ace up its sleeve after all.

Full Lab Results Test Reports RSS Feed More Test Reports Back to Homepage What's New on S&V