Sony VPL-VW500ES review

Ultra HD video has incredible impact when projected on a wall, and even though the Sony VPL-VW500ES is incredibly expensive it’s still cheaper than many Ultra HD projectors.

The VW500ES is very similar to the Sony VW1000ES, with a centrally-mounted lens and gorgeous sculpted black chassis. The VW500ES is smaller, though, so it should fit in more living rooms than the VW1000ES. Otherwise, Sony has made very few sacrifices to reduce the cost. The biggest changes are reduced brightness, which has been reduced to 1,700 ANSI lumens from 2,000, and the VW500ES’s lens is partly made from plastic. The lens cover is no longer motorised, so you must reach up to remove it when settling down to watch a film.

Connection ports are located on one side, but there are few, with just two HDMI inputs, and no audio connections. This means you’ll need to pass video signals through an amplifier to hear sound, and the amplifier must support at Ultra HD pass-through to play ultra high-definition content. Happily, the VW500ES’s HDMI inputs conform to the 2.0 standard, so you’ll be able to play full resolution 4K video recorded at 50 or 60fps. The projector also has two trigger inputs, an IR input, LAN port and RS232 remote input for home automation.

A row of power and menu controls are on the opposite side, but you can control everything from the comprehensive remote, including zoom, focus and lens shift. The remote control is backlit, so you’ll easily be able to find the right button in the dark. It also has shortcuts for picture mode, aspect ratio and Sony’s proprietary Reality Creation upscaling.

We like the onscreen menus, as Sony has arranged them sensibly to make calibrating and customising the VW500ES incredibly straightforward. Beyond the standard brightness, contrast, colour, sharpness and colour temperature settings, there’s a huge selection of extra processing options including Cinema Black Pro, which does a great job of producing deep blacks during darker scenes.

The comprehensive list of nine picture modes provides plenty of choice if you’re happy to use Sony’s calibrated presets. The best are undoubtedly Cinema Film 1 and Cinema Film 2, which create the most balanced picture without additional tweaking, but the game mode is a useful inclusion if you’ll use the projector with a PC or console.

Unsurprisingly, Reality Creation sits right at the top of the picture settings menu. This feature is used to make Full HD content look great when projected at Ultra HD resolutions. Reality Creation does a great job of sharpening native Ultra HD footage too. The feature is better implemented on the VW500ES than the VW1000ES because you can choose between edge enhancement only or edge enhancement with additional texture and detail enhancements. Some may find the latter option excessive as it can soften film grain in order to bring detail out in other areas, but for the most part we loved its ability to make even the highest quality Blu-ray disc look that little bit more detailed and precise. The overall picture is a tiny bit softer than the pin-sharp VW1000ES, but you’d only notice when the two projectors were set up side-by-side.

The 4,096×2,160 SXRD panel produces incredible images when fed a native 4K signal. The texture detail in the opening scene of our 4K test film Tears of Steel is far sharper here than on any 4K set we’ve tested so far. Colours are vibrant out of the box, with a slight tendency to favour reds, but this can be adjusted using the colour correction setting.

At 1,700 lumens the VW500ES is just about bright enough to use in daylight if you’re watching bright content like a football match. For darker content such as films, you’ll still want to draw the curtains in order to make out the details. Contrast is excellent, with no real need to tweak the picture further in order to see everything as the director intended.

The VW500ES also impressed us with its motion handling. The Smooth High and Smooth Low settings made made films recorded at 24fps look more like broadcast television and smoothed images too aggressively. However, the Impulse mode reduces motion blur without adding the same effects. It does dim the picture, though, so you should watch footage in a dark room with the feature enabled.

The VW500ES also excelled in our everyday use tests, and remained quiet throughout our testing. Indeed, we could barely hear it when watching films.

With the VW500ES, Sony has managed to create a projector that has plenty of features and very impressive image quality. It’s still incredibly expensive, but the VW500ES’s HDMI 2.0 inputs will extend the life of the projector, and it’s cheaper than an 84in Ultra HD TV. If you want an Ultra HD home cinema projector, the Sony VW500ES should be at the top of your shopping list.