Sony Bravia Vpl-Hw10 Sxrd Projector Reviewed
Having made a sensational debut on the truly remarkable but also hideously expensive Qualia 004 projector back in 2004, Sony’s SXRD technology has slightly struggled to get down to a truly mass market price level. The nearest we’ve got to date is the £2,000 or so VPL-VW40, checked out back in May. But today that price is about to be trumped pretty convincingly by Sony’svery latest SXRD offering, the VPL-HW10.
At around the £1,500 mark, this projector should finally make SXRD technology genuinely competitive with decent Full HD LCD and DLP projectors. Plus, of course, it puts more clear blue water between SXRD and its closest rival technologically, JVC’s D-ILA projectors, which start around the £2,900 mark for the ground-breaking DLA-HD1.
What makes the HW10 particularly exciting, though, is the amount of features Sony has managed to get into it without pushing the price higher – including the ‘intriguing’ MotionFlow processing first discovered on Sony’s high-end VPL-VW200 projector.
MotionFlow comprises two elements, both individually adjustable within the onscreen menus: Film Projection, and Motion Enhancement. Of these the latter is the most straightforward, as it’s simply Sony’s take on the idea of inserting extra, newly calculated frames of image data to make movement in the picture look more fluid and sharp.
Film Projection is much less straightforward, but by and large what it tries to do is insert ‘blank’ frames of image data in a bid to recreate the 24fps sensation of watching a film in the cinema. In doing so, it boosts contrast and, interestingly, reduces the appearance of judder, since it gives your eyes time to blend one frame into the next.
Also impressive to find at the HW10’s price point is Sony’s Real Colour Processing, a remarkably (for a £1500 product) sophisticated toolkit for fine-tuning colours to within an inch of their lives. The way it works is by letting you adjust the red, green, blue, yellow, magenta and cyan colour elements in the picture on an individual basis, using an adjustable ‘pie-chart’ interface that allows you to expand a particular colour’s range and/or position in the colour spectrum.
While you’re using it, this system cunningly knocks out of the image you’re watching every other colour than the one you’re trying to adjust. And so if you’re tweaking the red element, the picture is black and white except for where there’s a red element in the picture. This may look rather creepy at times, but it’s a truly inspired way of allowing you to see precisely what impact your adjustments are having. We should say that we don’t recommend messing about with RCP unless you’re pretty confident about what you’re doing, but that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile as a feature.
Sony’s imaginative approach to user interfaces can be seen, too, with the MPEG noise reduction system the HW10 carries. For this allows you to pick your preferred block noise and mosquito noise combination by shifting a point along a ‘graph’ where Block NR runs along the horizontal axis and Mosquito noise runs up the vertical axis. The beauty of this system is that it lets you pinpoint much more accurately the setting where either or both noise reduction routines go from aiding to actually spoiling the picture.
