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Sony VPL-VW60 Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Art Feierman

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VW60 Menus

The Sony VPL-VW60 projector loads most of their image related controls in the Picture Menu. They also have more "main" menus than most, which means several only have two to four items, and I have skipped images of some of them, to reduce clutter.

The first item on the Picture menu is the Picture Mode. Sony offers a choice of Cinema, Standard Dynamic, and three custom User settings.

The Cinema Black Pro setting contains two options, one for selecting the Iris setting (choice of Off, Manual, Iris 1 and Iris 2). It is the Iris 2 setting that, according to Sony, yields the highest contrast ratios.

The other option on the Cinema Black Pro menu is Lamp, with a choice of High and Low. I like having lamp control on a Picture submenu, although since you have to find in in the Cinema Black Pro submenu, it takes a bit to find it if you aren't using the manual.

VPL-VW60 menu picture colortemp

VPL-VW60 menu picture ctemp custom3

VPL-VW60 menu picture gamma

VPL-VW60 menu setup

Next comes all the usual settings; Contrast, Brightness, Color (saturation), Hue, and Sharpness, plus two additional sub-menus - Color Temp, which gives you a choice of High (default for Dynamic mode), Middle (default for Standard, and Low (default for Cinema). In addition there are thre Custom settings; 1, 2, and 3. I used (randomly), Custom 3 for calibrating the VW60's grayscale. Shown is the Color Temp menu.

To the immediate right is the Custom 3 color temperature menu, with the settings that I ended up with for viewing movies (this will be discussed in the Calibration heading below.

The Expert Setting area, also offers two sub menus, Black Level Adjust, with choice of Off Low and High (I found Off worked best on most movie content), and Gamma Correction.

Gamma correction offers four choices; Off, Gamma 1, 2, and 3. I preferred Off or Gamma 1. Gamma 2 offers a lower gamma (brighter in the mid-ranges), and Gamma 3, was a high gamma - rather dark, and crushes near blacks a noticeable amount.

Moving to the next main menu - Advanced Picture, you wil find sub-menus for RCP (Real Color Space), which contains 3 definable User areas. For each you can tweak each of the primary and secondary colors, with saturation and hue controls. This offers serious capability for performing more advanced calibrations than I do (I stick with just a grayscale calibration for optimum overall color balance). There is also a colorspace menu with standard and wide settings (I left the projector set in Wide.)

A Screen menu (not shown), offers aspect ratio control, (yes the Sony supports anamorphic lenses), Overscan Control (which offers off or on), and a Signal adjust which allows you to adjust the image on the screen vertically and horizontally by pixel.

The Setup menu shown here offers language choices, fan choices, Power saving mode (off/on), and the Lamp reset feature for when you replace the lamp.

That leaves two other "active" menus, as well as an Info menu. The next active menu is the Function menu, which controls auto input select, HDMI control the default background color, and the test pattern option. When On, hitting the Lens control button the remote, brings up a test pattern to make it easier to focus, fill the screen with zoom, and to adjust the vertical lens shift. The last active menu is Installation menu, which sets projector orientation (flip image), which allows front or rear projection, ceiling (inverted) or table. It also offers IR control features and Lens Control (off / on). I would presume that turning Lens control off, prevents anyone from changing the three settings (focus, zoom, lens shift) once a projector is fully set up in your room.

Overall, a good layout for the menus overall. I think seven main menus might be one or two, too many, but it is definitely functional.

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