The venue might have been the achingly cool Sony Music building in Kensington, but we definitely weren’t there to listen to music. Instead, eye candy was the order of the day.
For tucked away in a blacked out meeting room was the Sony VPL-VW500ES home cinema projector, along with many of the key engineers responsible for its development. And after spending a couple of hours in the VW500ES’s presence we can’t help but thing that it’s potentially the single most important projector of its generation.
There are two main reasons for our excitement. First, it’s a 4K-resolution projector. Second, it’s scheduled to cost just £8,800. Maybe even a touch less.
SEE ALSO: What is 4K and UHD? 
This price is pretty incredible when you consider that Sony’s debut 4K projector, the sensational VW1000ES, cost £17,000 when it launched just 18 months ago. In fact, the price is low enough to throw the Sony VW500ES into the projector mix alongside non-4K projectors like the JVC series we previewed last week.
Obviously the suspicion has to be that Sony has had to cut all sorts of good stuff out of the VW500ES to deliver such a vast price cut from the VW1000ES. But during a presentation by product manager Tak Nakane, if anything it felt as if the opposite was true.
Both the VW500ES and VW1000ES enjoy the same advanced, fast-response 4096x2160 native chipsets, for a start. And both deliver enough expanded colour range to earn the Sony Triluminos label introduced with the brand’s wide colour gamut W9 TVs this year.
The VW500ES also enjoys Sony’s Reality Creation processing feature for advanced upscaling of HD and a special processing ‘shortcut’ for optimizing performance from Sony’s new Mastered in 4K Blu-rays.
The VW500ES actually improves on the VW1000ES by including a new version of Sony’s MotionFlow processing, complete with new modes not found on the VW1000ES. It also, more importantly, comes with HDMIs able to accept 4K signals up to 60fps (albeit only at 8-bit with 4:2:0 colour subsampling), whereas the VW1000ES can only handle 4K frame rates above 30fps if owners hand over £2,800 to have an entire electronics board inside their projector replaced.
The Sony VW500ES does lose out to its high-end predecessor where claimed brightness and contrast are concerned; it delivers 1700 Lumens brightness and 200,000:1 contrast versus the VW1000ES’s 2000 and 1,000,000:1. But actually the VW500ES’s claims still look more than satisfactory for the regular home cinema market.
Getting up close to the VW500ES reveals a projector much smaller than we’d expected. This is because Sony has managed to essentially fold the VW1000ES’s light path in half for the VW500ES.
Settling down to watch a lengthy showreel of 4K demo content on a 130-inch screen, two things quickly became apparent. First, we were reminded that it’s not a good idea to use a projector in a room with a white ceiling like Sony’s demo room, as this can cause excessive amounts of secondary light reflection.
Straight after noticing this, though, we were struck by just how well the Sony VW500ES combated the reflected light thanks to its startlingly high brightness output. And shortly after that we found our eyes widening in amazement at the stunning amounts of clarity and detail visible in its 4K pictures.
We’ve already become accustomed now to the gorgeous impact UHD/4K resolutions can have on TV screens, but this impact is even more striking when applied to a screen as large as the demo’s 130-inch one. We can only dream of the spectacle the Sony VW500ES might produce with the 300-inch screen it’s allegedly capable of driving.
As well as looking more detailed than HD pictures, we were also struck during the demo by how you didn’t feel aware of the picture’s pixel structure at all, despite its enormous size. Plus the depth of those parts of the demo footage featuring extensive views across landscapes and cities was just stupendous, helping create a near 3D sensation that draws you in like no normal HD image could.
Sony’s demo content also includes some extremely red-saturated footage, featuring lots of subtly different red tones. And this looked almost too good to be true on the VW500ES thanks to its combination of 4K resolution and expanded colour range handling.
If there was any part of the VW500ES’s performance we have any doubts about, it’s contrast – or black level response, at any rate. Certainly it didn’t seem to rival JVC’s new models in this department. Though to be fair, the amount of light reflection from the demo room roof made forming any accurate sense of the Sony’s contrast performance impossible.
Really nothing in the demo, though, could dent our enthusiasm for the Sony VW500ES. From what we’ve seen so far it’s looking set to be not only one of the best projectors we’ve tested but also one of the most influential. A full test sample can’t arrive at our test rooms soon enough.
Next, take a peek at our pick of the best 4K TVs
