Sony VPL-VW300ES review

However, we certainly can’t complain about the VW300ES’s picture quality, as the 60fps 4K nature footage provided by Sony for our testing looked absolutely stunning, showing just what the projector will be capable of when 4K finally gets off the ground. 

Admittedly, the VW300ES’s 1,500 lumen lamp struggled to show areas of fine shadow detail with the lights on, but colours truly come alive in the dark. We didn’t have to shroud our room in complete darkness either, as we could still see a huge level of detail with a bit of ambient light present. 

Picture quality was outstanding from the outset, and we felt little need to tamper with the projector’s various menu settings. There are several different picture modes to choose from, including two Cinema modes, Reference, TV, Photo, Game, Bright Cinema, Bright TV and User, but all of them are fully customisable. Cinema 1 produced the most pleasing picture, so we used it for the majority of our testing.

There are basic contrast, brightness, colour, hue, sharpness and colour temperature settings, as well as gamma, colour correction and colour space options in the Expert Settings menu. The Dynamic contrast and cinema scope options that were present in the VW500ES are missing here, but we didn’t mourn their loss.  

Sony’s 4K Reality Creation engine is also onboard for upscaling Full HD content to 4K. Blu-ray discs showed clear sharpening and highlighting of smaller background details and facial features when paused, particularly around eyes and hairlines, but the effect grew less obvious the further back we sat from the projection screen. We struggled to notice it once films were in motion. That said, general upscaling was still incredibly impressive, as the midnight forests of Pandora looked stunningly sharp and clear in Avatar even without Reality Creation turned on.

Sony’s MotionFlow feature, which adds extra frames into films to help make them appear smoother, was more pronounced. The Smooth High and Smooth Low settings were a little too pronounced for our liking, but Combination and True Cinema looked much more natural. 

Naturally, the VW300ES is 3D-ready as well. It sadly doesn’t include any active shutter glasses in the box, but according to Sony it’s compatible with all active shutter glasses brands so you don’t necessarily have to get Sony’s own TDG-BT500A glasses to add an extra dimension to your viewing experience.

We saw no signs of crosstalk or flicker throughout our testing, and while glasses cause an inevitable darkening of the screen, we were pleased to see two presets for boosting 3D brightness. You can also adjust the 3D depth, although we found the default setting to be perfectly comfortable. All of the 2D picture modes are available in 3D too, giving you plenty of options to help tweak the picture. 

The Sony VPL-VW300ES is a fantastic 4K projector, which we’re sure will fit the bill for anyone looking to kit out their home cinema setup with the latest tech and has the cash to do it. However, because 4K content is still a rather nebulous concept outside of 4K Smart TVs, we don’t feel we can give it a full recommendation just yet – especially when you can get a perfectly capable Full HD projector such as the Sony VPL-HW40ES for under £2,000 and get full use out of it right now. We have no qualms about the quality of the VPL-VW300ES; we just wish there was something to watch on it.