What have I claimed the opposite about with the 1100ES? I said before that I liked the X500 more. The VW1100ES has it's strengths but it's no match whatsoever to the JVCs when it comes on/off contrast. It reminds me very much of a DLP image. This VW1100ES seems sharper to my eyes compared to the one I saw last fall and I think a lot of that is due to using it in reference mode vs cinema 1 mode which is brighter. I've had a lot more time to spend with it compared to the one I saw in the fall, but the X500 is not far behind in sharpness. Also, you haven't answered my question. Have you seen any of the other top LCoS models next to the 350ES? You're claiming some people's posts as "ignorant". I think it's important to give subjective advice only if it's your own. One should never resort to saying something is definitely better if they haven't actually seen that strength themselves. There are certain things, like lumen and contrast measurements, that can be quoted from reviews because it's something that is objective. But other aspects can be purely subjective, like sharpness, motion, and general fidelity. If you haven't seen these things in person you really shouldn't be using review site comparison quotes as your defense. Like I said, you really need to take most of those reviews with a grain of salt because they often don't have things set up properly to make fair comparisons. Brightness matching is the most important and I think, recently, turning all the post processing/sharpening crap off is also important. This right here is why you need to take those "sharpness" statements and throw them out the window. Because it's only with RC enabled will you get an appreciably sharper image like I said, but this comes as a cost. Grain, backgrounds, and faces all take on a noisier "hard" appearance. You lose some of that naturalness in the image to get the picture to look sharper. Sometimes you read what you want to read or you may not have all the information as to why someone said what they did. More often than not a review is missing information like this. Can you tell me in the reviews/comparisons you read about where the Sony's image appeared sharper than another LCoS projector, did they talk about where RC was set to and if the images were brightness matched when making these comparisons? Like the ear with louder speakers, the eye likes a brighter image more and can taint what is actually going on. It's important to brightness match and disable settings that make the comparison unfair if you're going to make definitive statements.
When I first saw the 1100ES last fall and made my comparison to the X500 it was in the same room on the same screen but it was one image right after the other. Mark's screen wasn't really large enough to do a proper A/B. Now that I've had the 1100ES here, I've been able to do my own proper A/B and yes I like the 1100ES moreso than before, but is still not as good as the JVC in a couple areas.
Contrast is very important (some argue the most important, I think a balance between a few things is more important than absolute contrast performance) and I think it's bad to downplay this on the forum when we look at the 350ES. You say you've measured 10000:1 but I've seen two well respected publications, Sound & Vision and Cine4home (who've measured a series of units that they sold) and got around 6500:1, not 10000:1. I'm not saying your measurements are incorrect, but I think it's fair to say most units aren't getting 10000:1. You may have a good sample. It's also important to note that the 600ES/1100ES got the updated optical block that the 350ES has. New 600ES units will have the same native contrast as the 350ES and the 1100ES will have more than older 1100/1000ES units. But the 600ES will also have a manual/dynamic iris on top of that. If anything don't downplay this deficiency because at the end of the day recommending this projector to someone who's expecting good contrast performance because that's what someone said on the forum is going to do more harm than good. Because it's simply not true in the context of what a $10,000 2015 projector should have and especially so when there are several sub $3000 projectors that outclass this projector in this regard. This is it's only real weakness in my opinion and it's enough enough of a difference to highlight the drawback when comparing to the current competition and even when comparing to much cheaper units. Other than that it's a stellar projector with some worthwhile valuable assets (4K panels and high brightness for instance). From what I've been told, relatively speaking, the 600ES' street price is not much more and I think would be a no brainier simply due to the addition of that highly important dynamic iris.