Sony VPL-VW40 Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance-5

Posted on February 11, 2008 by Art Feierman

VW40 Projector Measurements and Calibration

Ahh, where to start. Since the VW40, is essentially a repackaged (it seems) VW50, it's not surprising that the lumen measurements are similar. This time though, I spent more time setting up "custom" variations of the Cinema, Standard, and Dynamic modes, so measurements do vary. All measurements unless noted, were done with the lamp on high power.

Before I get into numbers, I should report here, that overall, the VW40 seems to oversaturate colors in default mode. For watching, I decreased saturation slightly. I think different screen types will affect your take on the saturation, so I won't get into numbers.

Cinema mode - This is the traditional "best" mode - however the Sony is definitely significantly off in terms of color balance, and really does need adjustment to get a first class image.

Ideal color temperature is D65 - which is 6500K (kelvin), for movie watching...


White (100IRE)	6818K
Light gray (80IRE)	6998K
Medium gray (50IRE)	7373K
Dark gray (30 IRE)	7668K

As you can see the projector gets cooler (shift towards blue - higher numbers), as you move down from white to dark gray. The background color of the VW40 also exhibits a blue caste to its blackest blacks.

Since setting lamps on low power tends to shift their color temperature, I measured white - with all other settings the same - at low lamp. It was very close at 6773K.

After a grayscale calibration of the Cinema mode, I ended up with these settings:


Gain:	Red=1	Green=-1	Blue = -3
Bias:	R=7	G=-5	B=-4

In reality this still ended up with a touch too much green at times, be advised.

Still, the numbers were dramatically improved:


100IRE	6395K
80IRE	6496K
50IRE	6638K
30IRE	6471K

Now thats a nice tight set of measurements staying extremely close to the ideal 6500K.

For Standard mode, I only measured with the same settings that you see above for Cinema mode, in terms of Gain and Bias. This created results much better than, and very different from the defaults: Here's the measurements after adjustment: