Sony VPL-VW40 Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance-6

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Art Feierman

For the Dynamic mode, this time I created several custom settings, some are focused on getting the best picture out, others on maximum brightness.

Dynamic: Default settings: (way, way, too cool) - color temp defaults to high


100IRE	10,032K
80IRE	10,123K
50IRE	10,158K
30IRE	11,030K

And strangely, green was measuring low, throughout. Most projectors in their brightest mode push green up, to get out more lumens.

Dynamic, same as above, but color temp set to low:


100IRE	6860K
80IRE	6927K
50IRE	6927K
30IRE	7490K

Dynamic, default, except choosing Custom 1 color temp instead of High, this was very bright:


100IRE	7413K
80IRE	7462K
50IRE	7464K
30IRE	7148K

This mode worked very well for sports viewing, nice and bright, and slightly cool. That makes these my prefered settings for Dynamic.

Lastly, an attempt to customize Dynamic, for accurate color around 6500K. While these settings do the trick, the end result is an image no brighter than Cinema, or Standard.


Gain	R=12	G=30	B=-11
Bias	R=14	G=1	B=-11


100IRE	6955K
80IRE	6976K
50IRE	6899K
30IRE	6537K

Bottom line: The Sony is a significantly better projector as the result of grayscale calibration. If you plan to just take the Sony out of the box and use it, without doing even basic adjustments (such as using the numbers I've provided), you aren't going to get your money's worth.

VW40 Image Noise

The Sony VPL-VW40 passed the HQV 1080 tests without difficulty. I did not run the Noise Reduction filter, despite the fact that the Sony does seem to have just a bit more background noise than some other projectors, when observed closely. Overall, at normal seating distances, just enjoying the content, the Sony did just fine in terms of image noise and motion artifacts.