Sony VPL-HW50ES review

When it comes to setup, you’ll need to be able to reach the projector because lens control is completely manual – slightly disappointing for a high-end projector. Optical zoom is also limited to 1.6x, which fares badly compared to Panasonic’s range-topping projectors which have greater levels of zoom, as well as mechanical zoom and focus controls. Horizontal lens adjustment is limited to +/-25% but vertical adjustment is a much more forgiving +/-71%.

Once you’ve focussed the lens, you can control everything from the comfort of your sofa thanks to the comprehensive remote control, which is backlit to make it easier to operate in the dark. It has all the major features you would expect, including input select, picture pre-sets, aspect ratios, colour, gamma, brightness, sharpness and contrast controls.

After initial setup, you can control everything using the comprehensive remote

The on-screen interface is equally straightforward to use, with the all-important image quality settings kept in one main menu and the more advanced features hidden in sub menus. It doesn’t obscure the whole screen, making it much easier to fine tune picture quality with live previews as you enable or disable each setting. There are plenty of pre-sets to use as a starting point, including two Cinema modes, TV, Reference, Photo, Game and a fully customisable user mode. There are also Bright Cinema and Bright TV modes for when you can’t draw the blinds or dim the lights – they both work, but even though the 1,700 lumen lamp is much brighter than the outgoing model, you undoubtedly get better results in a dark room.

Picture quality in general was superb, thanks in part to Sony’s proprietary Reality Creation image processing engine. It works wonders, even with Full HD content, adding extra sharpness and detail to scenes. It does so without generating any extra noise or unwanted side effects, and we couldn’t find any reason to switch it off throughout our testing.

Darker scenes in particular benefit greatly from Reality Creation, bringing out shadow detail that would otherwise go missed on similarly priced projectors from other manufacturers. It does this without raising the brightness, keeping colours and contrast accurate and avoiding unwanted grey washouts. The Auto Iris function helps out here, working quickly and without becoming obtrusive, but there’s also an option to disable it if you prefer. Colours in general were bold yet still appeared natural, aided by the extra brightness from the 1,700 lumen lamp.