Sony VPL-HW10 – Good color accuracy
Sony VPL-HW10 has excellent picture quality; the color reproduction is relatively accurate and the black levels too are relatively deep. However, the primary colors could have been better, I noticed a few artifacts with the 1080i sources but this is not unforgivable considering the price of the projector. The performance is better than the less expensive Sanyo PLV-Z2000.
While setting up, I used the Standard mode for my tests. I initially started with Low color temperature. The quality was similar to that of broadcast standard. The bottom end was off so I tried to correct through the Custom color temperatures using the grayscale controls. Normal color space setting was also used since it came pretty close to ATSC specifications for red, blue and green primary colors. I was disappointed to see that they cannot be corrected.
Overall color on the Sony VPL-HW10 is better than what I expected, the primary colors were better than most of the projectors in this price range. I also liked the grayscale tracking and color decoding. The colors were well saturated with very natural rendition of skin tone. The primary colors too looked pretty good. For instance, the grass and leaves looked pretty realistic instead of those neon or hyperrealistic looks which is ubiquitous in projectors these days.
Blacks on the Sony VPL-HW10 were deep and compelling as I expected. In very dark material, I did see some noise. The video processing was pretty good and the projector was pretty good in video and film deinterlacing tests. In the video tests, there were some jaggies and hence I won’t call the processing perfect. I would recommend you to keep the DRC processing switched of for most of the high quality sources.
For testing, it played chapter 8 of Kung Fu Hustle in Blu-ray, it is really good for evaluating the black level performance and also the fast motion handling. In the courtyard fight scene which takes place at night in the apartment complex, I saw that fast motion was pretty smooth and the detail clarity was excellent. The shadow detail too was pretty good which means that the black level performance of the projector is quite good.
When it comes to black level tests, the toughest one is in Planet Earth Disc Two which starts with the sky dives who jump in to the huge caves. There are some challenging scenes when the camera gets inside the caves’ depth. There are all black scenes which surround the close up of objects and animals. Many projectors falter in this black level performance tests but this projector came smiling through.
Connectivity on the Sony VPL-HW10 is pretty generous considering this is an entry level projector. This device has two HDIM ports, 15-pin VGA style RGB input, one component video inputs set, a composite video input and a S-Video. There is also a RS-232 control port, which can answer the custom installer’s needs for programming component’s function in to a complex touch-based remote control system like AMX or Crestron.
