Go big on your home cinema, with Sony’s VPL-VW870ES projector

FOR

• Beautiful colour palette • Excellent details in dark and light areas • True sense of picture depth

AGAINST

• Intensity of blacks not up to top TV standards • No 3D glasses included • Cheaper in-house competition

VERDICT

The VPL-VW870ES’S high-end picture quality comes at a high price compared with the competition both outside and inside of Sony’s 4K projector line-up

“The snow has such differentiation that you can begin to appreciate why the Inuits have so many words for the stuff”

Colour, clarity and long-lasting performance – those are the promises Sony makes about its VPL-VW870ES 4K projector. With an SXRD chip at its core, the same technology that powers the company’s professional-grade machines, we have high hopes for Sony’s latest 4K offering.

When we tested Sony’s previous true 4K projector, the VPL-VW270ES, at the end of 2018, it took us so close to a genuine cinema experience we could almost taste the popcorn. It wowed us with what it could do, and so even a £5000 price was fair for a movie experience of such quality. At £25,000, however, the 870ES comes with a considerably bigger price tag; so can it justify that difference?

The VPL-VW870ES is a sizeable unit, as one might expect of a top-end, 4K home cinema projector. At 22kg, compared with the 14kg of the VPL-VW270ES, installing one in your screening room is no small consideration. You’ll need a dedicated piece of furniture to house it, or some heavyduty screws and plugs if you wall- or ceiling-mount it.

As for inputs, there are two HDMI sockets for video, a USB for system updates and a LAN for smart installation purposes, all of which are neatly tucked away. The mattblack finish means the VW870ES is as subtle as a 56 x 23 x 51cm projector is going to get, at least visually.

ERGONOMIC EFFICIENCY

Elsewhere, the look and feel is excellent. The on-screen menus are easy to follow and, if they won’t win awards on their own, the 870ES’S remote just might. It feels good in the hand, has the obligatory backlight and offers easy access to all your lens adjustments, picture settings and viewing modes. Getting the projection display just right is a little tricky because of the speed at which the motorised lens responds – our intended settings tended to fly right by unless we were careful – but that’s our only gripe.

Sony’s true 4K projectors start at £5000, but if that’s the cost of SXRD – which is essentially Sony’s attempt to combine the best of DLP and LCD technologies – what do you get for an extra £20,000? The first major cost is Sony’s Z-phosphor laser light source, which promises 20,000 hours of operation compared with mercury lamps offering around a quarter of that. The second significant engineering improvement is the glassware on the front. The VPLVW870ES sports what Sony calls an ARC-F lens (All Range Crisp-focus), designed to optimise the colour convergence from the three SXRD panels for a pin-sharp and colouraccurate picture, with a throw ratio of 1.35:1 to 2.90:1.

In our tests, we get a better picture with the Advanced Iris setting switched off, as it tends to blast out the brightness of light areas. This is most obvious in shots of the black hole in Interstellar, in an otherwise beautifully rendered scene. The 870ES supports the HDR10 dynamic range standard and it’s a treat to take in the levels of depth and detail this 4K projector produces in scenes with bright cloudy skies, or dusky landscapes with dark water shorelines. The 870ES is also compatible with HLG, the 4K HDR broadcast technology used by the BBC.

The presets are decent too. Taking the Reference mode, we turn down the colour setting a notch, raise the hue a bit and increase the brightness a smidge, and come up with a palette that the Sony should be proud of. Rich and natural, no matter the source, this is where the VW870ES really sings.

Whether graded like an old-time, Technicolor western, such as our 4K version of The Hateful Eight, or with the surreal edge of our 1080p copy of Life Of Pi, it’s the kind of viewing that could convert you to a projector for life.

NO GOING BACK?

What might make you think twice is the dark details – the 870ES falls short of superb here. We play the submarine attack scene in Aquaman in UHD, where the action takes place against a low-lit, metal-grey backdrop. Here, the Sony projector creates a credible rendition of the mission team’s black uniforms but, compared with the top-end TVS, there’s still an inkier shade for these blacks to reach.

At the bright end, the details are even more impressive. As Kurt Russell trudges from stagecoach to shack through the blizzard of The Hateful Eight, the snow has such differentiation that you can begin to appreciate why the Inuits apparently have so many words for the stuff.

We put Sony’s six Motionflow settings to task using the wheatfield countrysides and futuristic urban landscapes of

Looper. The best compromise between judder and sickly smooth over-processing lies somewhere between the ‘Combination’ and ‘Truecinema’ modes. The former gives the most stable picture as the camera pans across the wooden supports of a barn; the latter is preferable to keep the flying vehicles looking realistic.

Even with fast-moving films, such as The Edge Of

Tomorrow, we are pleased with the results. As with the rest of the picture quality, that’s true whether from a 4K source or upscaled from 1080p. The best compromise between judder and sickly smooth over-processing lies somewhere between the Combination and Truecinema modes, but if you are particularly sensitive to motion processing, the ‘Off’ setting will still deliver great results.

ADMIRABLE CONSISTENCY

The VPL-VW870ES can process source material from SD all the way up to a maximum of 4096 x 2160px resolution at 60fps. We are seriously impressed with the consistency of performance between UHD and upscaled 1080p. The projector’s ability to artificially generate effectively 75 per cent of the picture on the fly is mind-blowing.

All in all, this is solid work from Sony – this projector is a true movie maestro. These last fractions of picture magic come at a cost, though, and at £5000, the VPL-VW270ES offers such a good chunk of that same cinematic quality that it’s hard to justify the extra £20,000 on this machine.

For the trifling sum of £35,000, you could buy the D-ILApowered JVC DLA-Z1 instead and own the finest projector that’s ever graced the What Hi-fi? test rooms. You’ll just have to look down the back of your sofa for the extra 10 grand.