Sony Cineza HS51A - Image Quality-3

Posted on February 11, 2006 by Art Feierman

The image on the right, and the one below it give you a good idea about how it handles shadow detail. The top image was exposed to look the way this scene appears when viewing. But, due to the limits of the digital camera's dynamic range, most of the detail on the right is lost in the photo.

To show you what the Sony captures, this second image was intentionally overexposed when I photographed it, so you can see all the detail that the projector actually displayed. There is some expected loss of details in the darkest areas, but about comparable to other competing LCD home theater projectors.

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Highlight detail was better than I found on the two less expensive LCD projectors, the Sanyo Z4 and the Panasonic AE900u, but not quite as good as BenQ's DLP PE7700 (the newest version with new firmware).

Again, I think that having great looking flesh tones is about as important an issue as there is for a projector. No matter how good black levels are, and highlight details, etc., if flesh tones do not look natural, it spoils the rest. So, again, I emphasize, with a good basic calibration, the Sony HS51 does really impressive fleshtones

I was particularly impressed with the naturalness of the flesh tones on Gandalf, above and of Will Smith in I, Robot, to the right.