Shift-free 4K
Sony VPL-VW285ES LCOS Projector
PRICE $5,000
ULTRA HD WITH TRUE NATIVE 4K resolution on its imaging chips has been, so far, difficult to do at a cost most consumers can accept. New Dlp-driven 4K projectors that utilize pixel-shifting, which delivers the full UHD pixel count in successive half-frames of diagonally shifted pixels, have recently come on the market at prices as low as $2,000. But native 4K projectors that can put all 8 million pixels in a UHD frame on the screen simultaneously have been pricey, with the cheapest to date coming in around $8,000.
At last September’s CEDIA Expo, however, Sony introduced three true-4k projectors including the VPL-VW885ES (laser-lit, and at $25,000, still astronomically priced), the VPL-VW385ES ($8,000), and the subject of our review, the VPLVW285ES ($5,000). That last one is hardly a Black Friday special, but it’s definitely the most affordable true native-4k consumer projector to date. So what, exactly, did Sony sacrifice from its pricier models to drive down the cost? Let’s have a look.
Features
The VPL-VW285ES is a three-chip SXRD design. (SXRD is Sony’s version of LCOS, which stands for Liquid Crystal on Silicon.) As with all other Sony 4K models, its imaging chips have a resolution of 4096 x 2160, rather than the consumer UHD standard of 3840 x 2160.
Like all 4K (full 4K or pixel-shifted) projectors we’ve seen to date, this one doesn’t offer processing of Dolby Vision high dynamic range content, now appearing via streaming or on some UHD Blu-ray Discs (though Sony claims that its own active HDR image processing does as good a job as Dolby Vision’s dynamic metadata). It does provide both HDR10 and HLG (Hybrid Log- Gamma) HDR processing; HLG is used sometimes for streaming and soon for 4K broadcasts. The advanced wide color gamut demanded by UHD is provided by Sony’s Triluminos color technology.
The projector lacks any type of iris, either fixed or dynamic—the latter useful for enhancing black levels. This is one of the primary ways the pricier VPL-VW385ES trumps the 285ES: The former has a selectable dynamic iris. Both projectors have powered lens focus, zoom, and shift, but only the 385ES includes recallable lens memories, a feature that may be high on your list if you enjoy a 2.35 wide format screen. (Neither model has an automated lens cover.) The 385ES also offers an auto calibration feature. That projector’s initial calibration must be done manually, but the auto feature is said to then analyze the colorimetry for any shift that occurs as the lamp ages and allow the user to reset the internal colorimetry to factory levels without affecting any external calibrations.
For the VPL-VW285ES, Sony claims a lamp life of up to 6,000 hours. But getting that far will depend on how you use the projector and how tolerant you are of the lamp’s slow but inevitable dimming over time. This could be a concern for maintaining those HDR highlights; you’ll want all the brightness you can get, for as long as the lamp will give it.
While full performance from all possible current UHD sources requires inputs capable of handling a bandwidth of 18 Gigabits per second, this projector maxes out at 13.5 Gbps. According to Sony, it can display a 60-hertz, 4K, HDR10 source at 4:2:0 color subsampling, but only in 8-bit color. The only way to get 10-bit color from such a source is to shut off HDR.
For HDR at a reduced 24-Hz frame rate, however, the projector retains the full 10 bits in HDR10. This covers virtually all Hdr10-enhanced Ultra HD Blu-rays we know of. UHD/HDR disc sources at 60 Hz are rare. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the only 60-Hz UHD Blu-ray currently available, played glitch-free at 4:2:0, 4K, 60-Hz HDR10, and 8 bits. But this 60-Hz limitation might be a concern with some streaming devices if they’re set to output 4K/UHD/ HDR/60 Hz.
An Input Lag Reduction control is also provided (which I didn’t test), but it’s not accessible in 4K. And when it’s on, the Motionflow and noise reduction features aren’t available. The Info menu provides the source input resolution, color subsampling, HDR designation, and signal frame rate, but not the bit rate of the source.
The cooling fan was virtually silent in the Low lamp mode. While it’s not totally silent in High (some of Sony’s 1080p designs are quieter), I didn’t find it obtrusive in my large room. And it was no factor at all when audio was playing from the source.
The remote control is large, with well-spaced, backlit buttons (many of them providing direct access to frequently used features). And fans of 3D will be happy to know that this projector also does 3D, though glasses aren’t included. Sony sells the TDG-BT500A at $50 per pair. Most third-party glasses that conform to the Full HD 3D standard will also work with this projector.
Control and Setup
The VPL-VW285ES offers eight Calibrated Presets (picture modes) plus a User preset that defaults to the same settings as the Reference
The VPL-VW285ES offers compelling images on a big screen.
mode; I used Cinema Film 1 and Cinema Film 2. The Cinema Black Pro feature includes the High/low Lamp Control and a Contrast Enhancer (High/middle/low). Motionflow is Sony’s motionsmoothing feature, which I didn’t use for the usual reason: the soap-opera effect—though Sony says you can minimize this while maintaining some degree of anti-blurring benefit by using the Smooth Low setting. With 4K sources, though (or any lesser source upconverted to 4K prior to the projector), Motionflow offers only one selection, Impulse, which performs gray-frame insertion between the original frames to reduce smear. It didn’t appear to do much in actual use.
The Sony won’t accept 480i sources directly, though it will handle 480p. In any event, this can be overcome by upconverting such material beforehand (in the player, set-top box, etc.). If the upconverted source was a letterboxed, non-anamorphic DVD, neither of the available 4K options in the Aspect menu (2.35:1 Zoom and Normal) would fill the screen with a correctly proportioned image. However, so-called “enhanced for widescreen” DVDS (by far the majority of DVDS produced) worked fine. There’s no anamorphic stretch option available with a
4K input.
The Color Temperature options provide both Gain and Bias white balance controls. A color management system (CMS, which Sony calls Color Correction) is also included. An HDR control, when set to Auto, automatically switches the separate Color Space control to a setting appropriate for the source (BT.709 or BT.2020).
An HDMI Signal Format control in the Function menu has two options: Standard Format and Enhanced Format. I tried Enhanced, but it produced no changes worthy of comment in the projector’s UHD/HDR performance on test patterns, real program material, or measurements.
A Panel Alignment feature gives you (electronic) control over the convergence of the red and blue imaging panels relative to green. I tried it, but my post-adjustment results differed little from Sony’s good out-of-box alignment.
I set up the projector 15 feet from my 96-inch-wide, 2.35:1 Stewart Filmscreen Studiotek 130 screen (gain 1.3). This put it roughly in the middle of the zoom range for the lens. As the Sony senses an SDR or HDR source, it will automatically switch some of the controls between different HD/SDR and UHD/HDR settings in the same Calibration Preset (picture mode). But one control it wonõt switch automatically is Lamp Control. I therefore elected to use different Calibration Presets for SDR (Cinema Film 1) and HDR (Cinema Film 2), and I switched manually between them.
First Take
In our standard HD/SDR video tests, the VPL-VW285ES passed both
3:2 HD and 2:2 HD, but it failed MA HD (motion adaptive) with minor, though more visible than normal, jaggies. The SD tests were irrelevant since the projector won’t accept 480i. The Sony passed the clipping tests when the input was 1080p but clipped below black when the input was 4K/SDR. It passed luma resolution. The projector failed the chroma resolution test with a 1080p input, though it passed with a 4K input.
Even straight out of the box, with a few basic adjustments, the Sony was impressive. But the default Brightness setting of 50 was optimistic; it might improve the contrast, but it crushed the blacks a bit too much, particularly in HDR. Even with some adjustment, however (test discs suggested that 55 to 58 worked better for HDR, 53 for SDR), deeply shaded areas on a very few otherwise bright HDR scenes still looked a little crushed in their shadow detail.
While the Sony’s black level was respectable, it wasn’t exceptional in either SDR or HDR. If you project a widescreen film with black bars onto a 16:9 screen (I did try this on my alternate Elite screen), you’ll definitely notice those bars—though they’re dark gray, and I didn’t find them obtrusive. But with widescreen films viewed on my 2.35:1 Stewart screen (which moves the black bars off-screen), the only times I was reminded of the projector’s less than remarkable blacks were on fade-outs between scenes, or if the controls (Contrast Enhancer, Brightness, Contrast, and, for SDR, Gamma Correction) weren’t optimized.
UHD/HDR
For HDR, the gamma curve (or EOTF for Electro Optical Transfer Function) is called the perceptual quantization curve, or PQ. While it’s different in shape than classic gamma curves, both indicate how the output luminance of a video display relates to the input.
When I checked the Sony’s PQ curve during the calibration, I found that even in the High lamp mode, with the Contrast Enhancer on High and the HDR Contrast control near maximum, measuring the PQ gamma curve off the screen with CALMAN 2017 showed an
HDR output that was dimmer than optimum. This might be taken with some grains of salt. Sony’s position, as I understand it, is that the PQ curve for a projector, while not irrelevant, is difficult to measure accurately in a way that relates to how you subjectively experience real-world images on the screen (which acts as a variable element in the total display “system”). The PQ curve was designed for flat-screen displays with peak luminance levels that are far higher than any projector can manage, and UHD program sources were designed to be watched on high luminance flat-screen sets.
It’s perhaps significant that three other Hdr-capable projectors I’ve checked recently had default PQ curves that measured much like the Sony’s. But only one of them (a new late-model JVC) offered controls that could move it closer to the PQ shape we see on flat-screen sets.
Nevertheless, on my traditional
1.3 gain matte white screen, both the
SDR and HDR images the Sony produced were exceptional and certainly not dim by any reasonable projection standard.
Animation nearly always looks good on almost any display, but if you know what to look for, it can be revealing. I often fall back on Trolls for both resolution and color. In this film’s style, most surfaces (from clothes to sets) appear richly colored and have a slightly fuzzy, felt-like texture. And here, the
Sony didn’t disappoint. All of the textures and stray strands of that felt-like look were clearly visible, and the colors were eye-popping, particularly in the vivid musical numbers.
Consistently bright animation doesn’t always contain the bright highlights that show off a display’s high dynamic range. But the live-action movie Lucy certainly does. The last 15 minutes or so is an almost psychedelic mixture of splashy color and light that vividly demonstrated the Sony’s HDR capabilities. It would be misleading to suggest that the projector will show this as dramatically as a premier flat-screen set, such as the latest OLEDS from Sony or LG. But try to convince your friends of that as they gather up their jaws from the floor after watching this movie on the VPLVW285ES with a projection screen much larger than what an even remotely affordable Ultra HDTV can provide.
And so it went from UHD disc to UHD disc.
Yes, there were a few UHD titles that played less well than others with this projector. When I rechecked Starship Troopers after finding it better than expected on another display, the Sony brought out its excessive noise (or perhaps exaggerated film grain) to the point where I couldn’t enjoy watching it (though Sony noted during our fact check that some tweaking of the noise filtering in the projector’s Reality Creation settings might have mitigated this). Arrival was simply too dark (as it also looks on other displays). And what was the transfer team thinking when they added gross-looking edge enhancement to the UHD release of Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong— enhancement that’s not present in the 1080p HD/SDR release. (Jackson’s is by far my favorite version of this story. Yeah, I know, the original is a classic, and blah, blah, blah—but while it’s astonishing for what it did in its era, it’s also severely limited by that era.)
However, most of the UHD discs I tried on the Sony looked amazing, including The Great Wall, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, Blade Runner, Allied, The Boss Baby, Ender’s Game (particularly in the climactic battle, with its brightly lit “video game” action), and Life of Pi.
In most of my HDR viewing, I used the High setting for both the lamp and the Contrast Enhancer, which generally worked extremely well. But on some scenes (though far from all), particularly of facial close-ups (images to which we’re all highly
sensitive), the High setting was too much. It sometimes obscured facial detail and looked slightly glaring and unnatural. This was apparent in the final bookend scene in Life of Pi
(in Pi’s Canada home). But I chose High most of the time, on most films; Middle often lacked the pop I expect from HDR. And bad-looking shots in High were outliers for me, rather than a frequent annoyance.
HD/SDR
After many hours spent watching 4K/HDR on the Sony, going back to HD in standard dynamic range required some adaptation. Not because the projector was inadequate in Sdr—quite the contrary—but because, even with the main limitation all projectors suffer from in HDR versus flat-screen sets (more limited peak output on bright highlights), it’s still a big step up from SDR.
I did alter a few of the HD/SDR settings from those I used in the Sony’s calibration—increasing the Contrast Enhancer from Low to Middle (a subtle but worthwhile change), changing the Contrast from 70 to 75-80, and alternating the Gamma between 2.2 for darker material and 2.4 for most. That darker material included The Finest Hours, an intense film about the rescue of crew members from a tanker split in two in a storm off the Massachusetts coast in 1952. The exterior night shots of the tanker on the dark ocean were difficult for the Sony, but the action was still clear. The interior shots were fine—dark, yes, but appropriately so, with the important details in the engine room still easy to see.
I’ve often used Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 for checking rendition of dimly lit content because it’s an unremittingly challenging disc in its SDR version. (I haven’t yet viewed the HDR release.) I was surprised at how well the Sony performed here, given its lack of a dynamic iris and its respectable but not exceptional contrast ratio. Shadow detail was good, even in some horrendously difficult shots of Hogwarts at night. It all looked appropriately gloomy, but it was never hard to follow or washed out.
Both of the above movies use a subdued palette. To view a film more obviously vivid but still natural, I pulled out Seven Years in Tibet. If I’d written this report three years ago, I’d have raved about the film’s beautiful photography, crisp images, and striking color design. All are still true, but I’d love to see this film in HDR, however unlikely that may be. (Still, it is from Sony Pictures, so there’s hope!) Nonetheless, watching it in HD/SDR on this projector, I had no complaints, except to wonder how it might fare with UHD’S wider color gamut.
I viewed only a limited selection of 3D material, but the Sony did well with it. The 3D images on the three discs I sampled— Tangled, A Christmas Carol, and Avatar— were impressive. The brightness in the default 3D settings (including High lamp mode), while not generous, was adequate. And I saw no obvious ghosting.
Conclusions
More than any other improvement, I would have welcomed a dynamic iris on the VPL-VW285ES to deepen its black levels. Sony’s dynamic irises are the best in the business. The step-up VPL-VW385ES does give you this, along with a few other additions mentioned earlier.
Nevertheless, while no projector can match either the dynamic HDR pop or the black level of the best flat-screen TVS, the VPL-VW285ES offers compelling images on a big screen. At last, projector fans have the option of a genuine full native-4k model that won’t break the bank and might just leave you feeling like you scored a bargain.