Photo gallery: Sony VPLHW10 SXRD Home Theatre ProjectorSony may have canned its line of SXRD-based rear-projection Grand WEGAs in favour of flat-panel LCDs, but the technology is going strong amongst front projectors. The VPLHW10 is the company's lowest-priced SXRD projector yet. Despite the relatively low price, the VPLHW10 is a very good performer, with more accurate colours than the VPLVW60 and delivering those deep black levels we've come to expect from SXRD. Among projectors we've reviewed, this entry-level Sony has become the unit to beat in the sub-AU$4,000 price range.
Design
A black glossy finish highlights the VPLHW10's sexy-looking design. It shares the same outlook as the company's more expensive SXRD models — the main thing that changes is size, as the more expensive models become progressively larger. The appearance consists of appealing curves with a rounded top and the lens centred on the chassis, which give a very symmetrical design. All of the connections — AC power, On/Off, Menu, Input, and the four-way arrow keys for menu navigation — are on the right side of the projector when table-mounted, or the left if mounted on the ceiling.
Sony's remote control is well laid-out and designed. It's fully backlit, which makes tweaking in a darkened room easier. The clicker has direct access keys to all the picture modes, as well as the brightness and contrast controls. The menu and directional rocker buttons are all located slightly north of the centre of the remote, which makes one-handed operation quite easy.
Features
There are many useful features on this projector and, as always, some that need to be avoided for the best possible performance. Both horizontal as well as vertical lens shifts are available, which help greatly in aligning the projector properly to the screen. Unfortunately, these controls are manual and can't be adjusted from the remote. The same goes for the Zoom and Focus features.
Perhaps one of the coolest features that helps improve picture quality is called Panel Adjust. This feature, which first appeared on the high-end VPLVW200, allows you to correct minor panel alignment problems with red and blue horizontal and vertical controls that work mainly on the centre of the picture. Both red and blue were off horizontally on our review sample, so the adjustment tightened up the alignment and improved the sharpness of the picture.
Dynamic, Standard, Cinema, and three User Picture Modes give you a lot of flexibility in fine-tuning the picture. Selectable colour temperatures include High, Middle, Low, and Custom, the latter comes with controls for greyscale calibration.
There's also a colour management system called RCP, which is billed as a utility for correcting the primary and secondary colours. Unfortunately, as we've found with past Sony projectors, this is still essentially a broken feature. We selected the Normal colour space in the Expert Setting menu and attempted to correct the red primary with RCP. While we were able to get red closer to broadcast specifications, doing so adversely affected colour decoding. As a result, we would recommend that you leave RCP off.
The Cinema Black Pro menu has the Iris controls and a Lamp setting of either High or Normal. We used High ourselves and suspect most installations will need to as well since the VPLHW10 is not a high light output projector. We measured 11 footlamberts on our 80-inch-wide Stewart Filmscreen Grayhawk RS screen, which is on the low side for such a small screen. We also selected Manual for the Iris setting and left it at 50 in the middle of the range. This setting produced good blacks and a stable picture with white and black levels remaining correct. If you choose an Auto Iris setting, these parameters will change depending on how bright or dark the content of the picture is. Unfortunately, we have not seen an Auto Iris feature that is fast enough so the eye can't see these changes with regular program material, and this Sony is no exception.
Connectivity is reasonably generous for an entry-level projector. The VPLHW10 has two HDMI inputs, one set of component-video inputs, a PC input, one S-video, and one composite-video input. We were pleased to also find an RS-232 control port, a feature that answers the custom installer's needs to program a component's functions into a sophisticated touch-panel remote control system, such as Crestron or AMX.
Performance
The VPLHW10 delivered very good overall picture quality, with deep black levels and relatively accurate colour. That said, primary colours could have been a bit better, and we noticed some artefacts with 1080i sources, but given its price this projector is superb. It easily outperforms the similarly-priced Sanyo PLV-Z2000, for example.
During the setup phase, we settled on using the Standard picture mode for our evaluation. We started with the Low colour temperature, which measured so close to the broadcast standard that we suspect Sony may have precalibrated our review sample. We also used the Normal colour space setting, but unfortunately red and green were still significantly off, and we found no way to correct them.
Overall colour was better than average though, as the primaries are still closer than with most projectors in this price range. Colour decoding was excellent, and greyscale tracking was also solid. The result was nicely saturated colours with highly natural skin tone rendition. Primary colours looked relatively good. For example, leaves and grass looked realistic rather than hyper-realistic or neon-looking, which is how most competing projectors make these natural objects look.
Blacks were compelling and as deep as we expected from SXRD. There was also precious little noise in very dark material. Video processing was reasonably good and the unit passed both film and video deinterlacing tests. We did notice some jaggies on the video-based test, so processing wasn't perfect by any means. As usual, we recommend leaving the company's DRC processing turned off for most high-quality sources.
Chapter Eight of the amazing Blu-ray transfer of Kung Fu Hustle is great for evaluating black-level performance as well as a display's handling of fast motion. In a fight scene that takes place at night in the courtyard of an apartment complex, clarity of detail was excellent, and fast motion was smooth. Shadow detail was also very good, which is a testament to the VPLHW10's black-level performance.
One of the toughest black-level tests we know of is the beginning of Disc Two of Planet Earth, which features sky divers jumping into huge caves. Once the camera gets into the depths of some of these caves there are extremely challenging scenes with virtually all black surrounding the close-up of cave animals and other objects. This is where you would be able to see real issues with black-level performance, and the Sony passed this test with flying colours. So to speak.
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