Projector Reviews

There are six color temperature selections: High, Middle, Low, and three Custom settings. Separate white balance (color temperature) adjustments, for both the top and bottom of the brightness range, can be dialed into the Custom options. The color temperature cannot be separately adjusted for each input and/or resolution, but you can assign any of these six options to any one (or more) input(s). The VPL-VW200 also offers two Color Space settings, Normal and Wide.

DRC (Digital Reality Creation) Mode is a proprietary Sony video processing technique, offered here in two different flavors, Mode 1 and Mode 2—plus Off. The active settings provide adjustment of the image on a two-axis graph, the oddly named "Clarity" on the x-axis and "Reality" on the y-axis, though the distinction between these is not clearly explained in the manual. I didn't find DRC to offer any benefits (in fact, quite the reverse), so I strongly recommend the Off setting.

As with most recent Sony projectors (and many of its one-piece televisions as well) the VPL-VW200 offers an iris with multiple options in its Cinema Black Pro menu. There are two automatic or dynamic settings to what Sony calls its Advanced Iris: Auto1 and Auto2. These open the iris on bright scenes and close it down on dark ones, resulting in an impressive "dynamic" contrast. There's also a Manual option that lets the user choose any fixed iris opening. The Off setting opens the iris to maximum.

What's New?
The VPL-VW200 can operate at frame rates of up to 120Hz. When it receives a source 1080p/24 frames per second (Hz) or 1080p/60 fps (Hz), it upconverts it to either 96Hz or 120Hz.

The Motionflow feature includes two options, which may be used separately or together: Film Projection (three modes, plus Off) and Motion Enhancer (High, Low, and Off).

The Motion Enhancer interpolates the added frames needed to upconvert the source frame rate to 96Hz or 120Hz, noticeably smoothing motion.

Don't let the name Film Projection suggest that this feature is a film mode for 3/2 pulldown. The projector has a separate control for that. Film Projection also performs motion compensation, but operates differently from the Motion Enhancer. Instead of repeating frames to reach either 96Hz or 120Hz, Film Projection alternates the existing source frames with either black or dark frames.

If you turn off both the Film Projection and Motion Enhancer features, the extra frames needed to upconvert the source frame rate to 96Hz or 120Hz are produced simply by repeating frames. For more detail on the Motionflow feature, see "Poetry in Motion?" at the end of this review.

One small but nagging problem with three-chip displays is that the alignment of those panels is critical if you're going to avoid on-screen misconvergence of the red, green, and blue images. The VPL-VW200's new Panel Alignment feature not only provides overall convergence of these three primary color panels, it provides separate adjustments for different zones on the screen, as well. Sony does not say, but it appears obvious that this adjustment is performed electronically, not by mechanical movement of the panels themselves. Moreover, rather than simply allowing movement of the colors in single pixel increments (as in the JVC DLA-HD1/RS1 LCoS projectors) Sony's Panel Alignment offers continuous movement down to fractions of a pixel.

Unfortunately, however, this feature may be used only with its own test pattern, and not a pattern from an external source. Out of the box, our sample of the projector needed no serious re-convergence. But I tweaked it anyway, just to check it out. After I was done I switched the source to an external crosshatch pattern. The alignment was worse than before. Fortunately, I only had to return to the excellent, as delivered default setting, which I used for the rest of my tests. But if you do need to perform a re-convergence, you might find that a back-and-forth, trial-and-error procedure will be required before you get a spot on alignment that's best for your outboard source. It's a great feature, but not as quick and easy to use as it could be.

There's also a new aspect ratio setting, Anamorphic Zoom, which pre-stretches the image to work in conjunction with an outboard anamorphic lens. The latter fits in front of the regular projector lens and allows use of the entire pixel array, without black bars, to display a 2.35:1 widescreen source on a 2.35:1 screen. Sony itself does not offer these anamorphic lenses. They must come from one of several suppliers who specialize in them—and good ones aren't cheap.

While I did not test this feature with the anamorphic lens and special 2.35:1 screen needed to make full use of it, I did find another, unusual use for the Anamorphic Zoom mode. It was the only mode that produced a properly proportioned, full screen-width image with older, 4:3 letterboxed (non-anamorphic) DVDs that have been upconverted in your DVD player to 720p or 1080i. On most displays the zoom mode is the proper selection for such non-enhanced letterbox releases, but here the Zoom mode left the image with a slight horizontal stretch, with the far left and right sides of the image chopped off. This odd application will be of interest primarily to long-time DVD fans with several such discs in their collections. Most of these titles, but not all, have been remastered to enhanced widescreen, for which the Full setting is the correct choice.

The new x.v.Color control might be useful if you can find a source with x.v.Color. For now, don't bother looking because there aren't any—nor do we expect them anytime soon.

Performance
The VPL-VW200 is exceptionally quiet—as are all recent Sony projectors—with its Cooling Setting set to Standard. If you have to use the High setting (appropriate for high altitude use, for example) the fan becomes clearly audible with no audio playing, but at my near-sea-level location it was still quieter than most projectors.

The projector's 480i-to-1080p video processing was hard-to-criticize. It sailed through all of my tests with scores that never dipped below very good but were excellent more often than not. These tests included the jaggies and 3/2 pulldown tests on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark test DVD (standard definition) and real world material such as the Coliseum "flyover" test in chapter 12 of Gladiator and the pan across the village buildings that opens Star Trek: Insurrection. The default Auto1 mode worked fine for both film-based material with 3/2 pulldown and video-based programming (2/2).

These tests were performed with the DRC turned Off. Both DRC modes (in their factory default settings) added significant artifacts and degraded the overall video processing performance from excellent to poor.

My reaction to the operation of the Advanced (auto) Iris in this projector surprised me. I've always liked this feature in past Sony projectors, finding its advantages (a deeper, richer black level) more than compensation for its negatives. While it's a bit of a Band-Aid solution to a problem that afflicts many digital projectors—inadequate deep blacks—it is an elegant Band-Aid.

But in the VPL-VW200 I was a bit disappointed in its operation. I could often see it working, not only on scrolling end titles with varying brightness levels depending on the amount of white lettering on screen (where I've often seen dynamic irises pumping and brightness comrpession in the past) but on real program material as well. This was true at all three Sensitivity settings (Slow, Fast, and Recommended), which determine how quickly the iris changes, and in both settings Auto1 and (my preferred option) Auto2.

I suspect the problem here may be that Sony has opted for a fairly aggressive operation for the Advanced Iris in the VPL-VW200. This, together with the new SXRD panels, helps it to achieve a center screen video black level of 0.001 foot-Lamberts on my relatively small projection screen—the lowest I have ever measured on any digital video display and right at the minimum sensitivity level of my Minolta LS-100 light meter.

The bottom line, however, is that I could not only see the iris making the image brighter or darker on abrupt shifts between light and dark scenes (transitions that are common in film) but was bothered more than before by brightness compression on such images as star fields, where the stars are dimmed along with the dark black background. I suspect that I have become more sensitive to this than in the past, having spent extensive time recently with JVC's DLA-RS1 LCoS projector, which achieves very low black levels without the use of an auto iris.

And as with all the LCoS/SXRD projectors I've reviewed, the corners of a full screen video black image are slightly lighter than the center—though here I see it primarily with the Advanced Iris engaged.

Fortunately, Sony has improved the native contrast ratio of its SXRD chips to the point where it produced excellent black levels even with the Manual iris option engaged. At 0.005fL, with the iris set to 92 (a setting required to get the peak white levels I'm accustomed to), the blacks weren't jaw dropping, and clearly not as low as the Auto settings can provide. But they were still well within the range of most of today's better home theater projectors. I did most of my viewing in this Manual mode.

The Manual iris image was helped by two other controls I hadn't expected to have much use for. Black Level Adjust has two active settings, High and Low. The description in the manual, "Produces a bolder, dynamic picture," sounds ominous—the sort of control you might want to avoid if your goal is a natural, film-like image. But this control merely deepens the dark grays and blacks in a different way than the Brightness control. It does not clip the blacks, or significantly alter a good black level setup. But in its Low setting (the one I preferred) it added a bit more snap to the picture and subtly reduced the trace of gray haze that sometimes crept into very dark images.

The other useful control was the Film Projection control, one of the two controls for use with the Motionflow feature. The projector must add new frames to the incoming signal in order to upconvert the source's 30 interlaced, 60 progressive, or 24 progressive frames per second to either 96Hz or 120Hz (frames per second). Film Projection does this by inserting either black or darkened frames between the original frames. This significantly reduces motion blur, and its effectiveness in doing so was often quite dramatic. But more to our point here, it also makes the image a bit darker. In Mode3, the setting I preferred, the change in overall brightness was barely noticeable, but worthwhile when used with the Manual iris.

Yes, you can darken the image by further reducing the iris setting instead, but then you won't get the motion compensation advantage of the Film Projection mode.

The only downside I found to this Film Projection feature is that it produces flicker on 24fps source material (it disappeared with a 60fps source). I saw this flicker clearly on stationary test patterns, but it was fleeting and hard to spot on real programming, and only then on large, bright areas that remained on the screen for more than a second or two. It's no worse than the flicker you see in the theater, which is probably why Sony dubbed it "Film Projection."

You could also argue that this feature more accurately duplicates the theatrical film experience than normal video. In a movie theater, the shutter is blanked for an instant between frames, as the next frame is mechanically positioned in the gate. In normal video display, successive frames are displayed one after the other without a break in between (apart from processing delays).

The other Motionflow feature, Motion Enhancer, is more controversial. Not in its operation; it does what it is claimed to do—smooth out the motion—and does it beautifully. But the result is an image that looks more like video than film. It's what I imagine a director might see when watching an on-set video replay of a shot taken by a video camera run in parallel with the film camera. The Motion Enhancer's image is both fascinating and disturbing. We're so used to the look of film that this processing takes us—or took me, at least—out of the movie. Those of you who've ever seen a Masterpiece Theater production where the British filmmaker used film for outside scenes and video for inside ones will immediately recognize the jarring nature of the effect. You might like it, but you're certainly not seeing the director's intention. Apart from checking the Motion Enhancer out, I didn't use it.