Blistering 4K resolution; excellent upscaling
Little or no native 4K material available
Forget Full HD -- Quad Resolution has arrived offering four times the picture quality. But before tossing your HDTV into the nearest landfill site, keep in mind that there are no immediate plans to release any 4Kx2K content.
It's reassuring that despite staggering losses over at Sony Corp this year, the brand is still pushing the limits of home entertainment. If you have a spare £16,790, the VW1000ES will beam a cinema-size image onto your wall at the same resolution as your local multiplex.
Features
Let's start with the specifications as that's what sets this projector apart. For some, 1920x1080 probably seemed like a reasonable amount of pixels to go around (that's what Blu-ray uses). Nonetheless, Sony has quadrupled that figure to 4096x2160 matching the format of its professional theatre projectors and the latest crop of professional 4K film cameras.
It is achieved by cramming many more pixels onto the SXRD panels that Sony uses in all of its projectors. Each pixel now measures 4μm. JVC's D-ILA technology works in a similar way, and its flagship also claims to output 4K resolution. But as Sony is quick to point out, JVC's system works by rapidly shifting the pixels to achieve a 4K effect and actually uses three 1080p chips. In other words, by cheating.
It took all our strength to heft Sony's projector onto its stand, but compact compared to the professional 4K rigs, it's very compact. The bulbous Cyclops lens is the front end of a specially developed optics and behind it is a dazzling 2,000W lamp. The extra headroom is required to push the light through all those extra pixels, but it also provides a much brighter and bigger picture. Up to 600-inches across according to Sony.
Performance
In Sony's screening room and on my own 120-inch screen, it managed to throw a picture that must surely put an end to the escalating war of resolution. Real life doesn't look any more real and even with your nose against the screen, it's hard to make out the panel structure at all.
Frustratingly there's almost no native 4K material to really show this thing off. The best Sony could pull together was one cheesy computer animation and some brief footage of a Japanese water garden and similar slow moving scenes. Presumably the processing required to play 4K video is considerable. Sony had installed the only graphics card currently up to the task in the PC playing this demo material. No commercial 4K players exist yet and there are no immediate plans to launch any 4K films yet.
If it looks like this product is a bit ahead of its time, there are two reasons for it to exist now. First and most importantly it has a terrific upscaler that Sony calls Reality Creation. It means Blu-ray movies look even more detailed. Focusing on a face for instance, and the lines and pores become more distinct.
The upscaling really comes into its own with 3D Blu-ray films like Hugo. This projector is of course 3D enabled with the IR sensor built into the casing and two pairs of active shutter glasses in the box. 3D tends to soften the image, but here Hugo really benefits from the additional lines.
3D footage also takes a brightness hit, but with 2,000 lumens blasting through it, that's not a problem for this projector. There are a range of presets to choose from and plenty of scope for adjusting the brightness. Without overly compromising the quoted 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
The other reason for owning a 4K projector is to view your digital stills at their full potential. Photos taken on a 12MP dSLR fill the screen nicely and you'll be amazed at what you see. Good cameras capture more information than we tend to appreciate, but here it's all on show. We were amazed at just how many miles we could zoom forwards into a landscape shot that we'd taken.
For some reason, viewing high resolution photos isn't as simple as plugging in via USB. You'll need a PS3 and the latest 4K edition of PlayMemories.
Viewing your Retina Display iPad is much easier. With Apple's HDMI adapter you can really appreciate how crazily detailed Retina Display is.
But at 2048-by-1536 pixels, it's well within this projector's capabilities.
Conclusion
Even the most hopeless early adopters will think twice about buying one of these, but if they do, they'll be enjoying the best home cinema projector currently available and all set for the 4K revolution -- should there ever be one.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
