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Official Sony VPL-HW40ES Owners/Settings Thread

209K views 2K replies 329 participants last post by  Ellebob 
#1 · (Edited)
I think enough Owners in the Sony HW-40ES information thread have expressed interest in a dedicated thread where owners can share calibration information, settings, etc.

Hopefully we can get some good information here from hobbyists and professional calibrators alike! I'll post my reference and game settings after I get home tonight. All settings I post will be eye-ball settings using WOW/AVS 709 patterns and a blue filter.

Some information on my setup in the meantime:

-Sony HW40ES projector
-Chief RPMAU ceiling mount w/16" dual joist adapter and 6" 1.5 NPT drop
-Yamaha RX471 5.1 surround receiver and speakers (powered Yamaha subwoofer)
-PS4 for Bluray/gaming
-Uverse STB for TV
-DaLite matte grey 90" pull down screen. Throw distance 9.5 feet (yeah...it's a small space ;))

EDIT: reference and game mode settings

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Picture Mode: Reference (Bluray & 3D)

Contrast 84
Brightness 55
Color 50
Hue 50
Color temp D65
Cinema Black Pro:low
Advanced > Color Space: BT709 (all others OFF)

Reality Creation > Resolution (default, halfway between Min/Max)
Reality Creation > Noise Filter (20)

3D brightness: 2

All other settings default
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Picture Mode: Game (PS4)

Contrast 78
Brightness 44
Color 50
Hue 50
Color temp D65
Cinema Black Pro:low
Advanced > Color Space: BT709 (all others OFF)


All other settings default
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
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#3 · (Edited)
My room is a small converted spare bedroom, 9.5 x 14 and PJ is 13' from screen, 7' high on a shelf on the back wall. Walls & ceiling are flat black. Screen is a 106" Silver Ticket cine-white.

Here are my settings and personal preferences:

Reference (Auto 2)
Reality Creation ON (but kept low at lvl 5 for both)
Cinema Pro Black - Low (ECO)
Motionflow / Motion Enhance - LOW for TV, Video Games & Movies (and 3D)

Contrast 80
Brightness 52
Color 55
Hue 50
Color Temp. D65
Sharpness 5 (kept low because Reality Creation is turned ON)
 

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#4 ·
Great thread. I'm a new HW40 owner but not new to PJs.

Mine has OTOB settings so far - all I did was set the lamp to "low". I'm blown away with the colors, sharpness and clarity, SDE being a thing of the past.

But I'd like to tweak it for more black detail.

Shooting from 13' back, ceiling mounted onto a 115" Elunevision AT screen.
 
#5 ·
Hello

I'm a owner of a Sony HW40ES.

My setup is at 13.5' from screen and projecting on a ELITE 135" Cinewhite gain 1.1 fixed screen. I'm running on eco on bulb.I have 3 sets of the PS3 3d glasses, they work perfect except they do not reach my seats at 21' from screen. I may buy extender soon.

I have the Sony 3d blue ray player the s5200 (very good player)

Yamaha RX471 5.1 surround receiver with Polk audio speakers.

My zoom is almost maxed. Do you think I need to move it back to around 15ft? For more clear picture.
 

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#24 ·
Hello

I'm a owner of a Sony HW40ES.

My setup is at 13.5' from screen and projecting on a ELITE 135" Cinewhite gain 1.1 fixed screen. I'm running on eco on bulb.I have 3 sets of the PS3 3d glasses, they work perfect except they do not reach my seats at 21' from screen. I may buy extender soon.

I have the Sony 3d blue ray player the s5200 (very good player)

Yamaha RX471 5.1 surround receiver with Polk audio speakers.

My zoom is almost maxed. Do you think I need to move it back to around 15ft? For more clear picture.
How do you keep people from smashing their head into the projector? I am in the middle of constructing a very similar riser and I've hit it myself twice during testing of height etc...

anyone have a solution for this? (other than moving the projector or seating)
 
#7 ·
how do you change the bulb setting? I seemed to find everything outside of the bulb setting to high low or eco.

My set up:
Sony HW40ES
Denon X2100w
Sony BDP-S6200 blu-ray
ATT STB (Motorola VIP2250 HD-DVR)


I'm running mainly on Reference right now, what do most use?
 
#10 ·
I'm in reference right now:


Contrast 80
Brightness 65
Color 53
Hue 50
Color temp D65
lamp high
motion 20
reality creation 20


just toying slightly but that's it. I'd like to tweak it.


On blu-ray the above is awesome. But on HDTV through my ATT Uverse box my wife seems to like Bright TV setting better.


Still tweaking some and interested in others.
 
#15 ·
I'll update my original post with settings as soon as I get the chance. Sorry guys, life has been getting in the way lately.

In the meantime does anyone have more detailed information on what the settings under Reality Creation do?

There are 3 settings, 'Resolution' which is Min to Max slider. 'Noise Filter', which I think was set to 20 by default...and I can't recall what the third one is offhand. If anyone can post more information here that would be awesome...I'll see what I can find in the meantime.

BTW, I did mess a little bit with motionflow in 3D mode over the weekend. Once it's moved from OFF to LOW I noticed my RF glasses immediately got darker. I thought that was kind of odd but that may have been a result of the glasses synching with the higher refresh rate. I tried OFF, LOW and HIGH and oddly enough I preferred OFF for Bluray 3D content. I can't say that I noticed a difference or reduction in crosstalk between any of the motionflow settings.

I need more information on what motion flow does as well, I assumed OFF was native refresh, LOW was 120Hz and HIGH was 240Hz but that may not be the case.
 
#18 ·
Thanks Yonex! Wow, those reference settings came out very close to mine (I only used Disney WoW & AVS 709 basic calibration patterns and a blue filter).

I wondered about 2.4 versus 2.2 gamma correction. Mine is actually currently set to off, but I liked the black level at 2.4. I'm going to have to try some tweaking @ 2.4 to see if I come up with something close to your ChromaPure results.
 
#97 ·

Hello


I wrote down various setting off this thread and tried those in the link above. At first it seemed pretty good especially with skin tones which I thought were better than out of the box ever so slightly. But blacks seemed to actually be too dark. While it appeared that the contrast between light & dark in scenes look good, details in darks, blacks and shadows seemed to be lost...almost too deep of black.


I flipped between Film 1 and these settings and while Film 1 gave better brightness and a bit less softness the color saturation especially in Red was noticeably more. Where as Reference (these settings) seemed better with skin tones, there was tad more softness and less bright.


I've got a screen from Dragonfly that's a High Contrast Lite Grey with 0.8 Gain by the way. PJ sits about 11.5 feet away on a 92" screen. I've got the Disney WOW disc and it's actually quite good. I used it with our Plasma before it went down and I replaced it with the Sony PJ. I might run that with this just to see what I get. In the mean time can someone explain....


In the RCP Menus where you can adjust the individual colors, there are two adjustment one being "Placement"...where I assume you can actually move the color on the wheel. What does that actually do in relation to changing the C, H, B levels?


What are the differences of "Color Space"...like BT709, D65, etc....


Thanks
Kenny J
 
#27 ·
Hi all,

I have recently joined the 40ES club and currently have mine projected on a taupe colored wall. I am waiting on a screen for the time being as the projector location (and resulting screen size) wont be determined until some new furniture arrives and I can decide on room arrangement. Not ideal at all, but decent enough for the time being.

I was hoping for some ideas on what adjustments to make to compensate for a taupe/beige screen. I am pretty much a novice when it comes to making video adjustments and never trust myself, not to mention I am slightly color deficient which never helps. Any advice?
 
#28 ·
Hi all,

I have recently joined the 40ES club and currently have mine projected on a taupe colored wall. I am waiting on a screen for the time being as the projector location (and resulting screen size) wont be determined until some new furniture arrives and I can decide on room arrangement. Not ideal at all, but decent enough for the time being.

I was hoping for some ideas on what adjustments to make to compensate for a taupe/beige screen. I am pretty much a novice when it comes to making video adjustments and never trust myself, not to mention I am slightly color deficient which never helps. Any advice?

Try some of the settings listed here and then adjust according to what you think looks best.


Unfortunately we're not getting a lot of comments in this section which is somewhat surprising considering how many people have this projector.
 
#30 ·
Now that I have my system set up up I'm very happy.
The image is sharper than sharp and black levels are as good as I bet I can get without painting my room dark.
I have a Laserdisk player a good collection of disks. I know calibration for laserdisk [analog] is different from that of Blu-ray or DVD.
Can I use the "custom" setting on the Sony to create a profile for the laserdisk without messing up my other settings?
 
#32 ·
Yes I have a few things. Mainly I have a anime series that I helped fund back in the day.

I had the option to get it on VHS or laserdisk so I went with the disk. I even have my name in the credits!

Of course they promised there would never be a DVD version...eventually there was.
 
#33 ·
Impressions on Reality Creation (RC)? I'm having a love/hate relationship with it right now. I mostly leave it OFF but lately the soft image of the Sony has me wanting a little more...well, reality.

Those of you who are using it, what level do you have it set at? I had it at 20 and just lowered it to 10 but even then, colors appear more "grayed out" and don't pop as much as when it's OFF.

Any thoughts?
 
#34 ·
I was not crazy about RC either. I wanted the Oppo 103 so I paid the extra to get the 103D (Darbee version) which does a much nicer job. With that said, I also wasn't thrilled with the Epson 5030 firmware upgrade that is similar to Sony's RC. I know that doesn't help you with your settings but the little I did use it, the less the better.
 
#38 ·
I use Reality Creation at around 10 with my Sony Blu Ray player. I like the detail it adds and I like the implementation of the 'Test' feature to see if it's adding noise.

:eek: I was thinking of this thread when I posted this in the 'other' vpl-hw40es thread:

"I was blown away by this PJ in 'Reference Mode', out of the box. Then I tried the settings in the www.Kalibrate.co.uk (v2) PDF linked earlier, including the 21 settings under Real Color Processing, and they make this thing really stellar. Now it seems factory 'Reference' looks sad! YMMV."

J
 
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#41 ·
I like to try settings that have worked on a pro calibration, just to see if they might work on my setup. This is the third PJ that I have had success with using a reviewers settings! Of course I don't hesitate to make further adjustments to suit my taste. Maybe I've been lucky or maybe there is more consistency to PJs than people generally acknowledge.

The 'chromapure' settings are just slightly warmer, but richer and more accurate overall than out of box reference is on my DIY silver cloth screen. I could not dial it in that well using my eye and my old DVE setup DVD.

I sure am glad I seem to have a good unit; if I didn't I would expect Sony to send me another with no excuses!

Good luck to all with getting things dialed in!
J
 
#42 ·
When you start messing with the CMS you can really start killing lumens when using the colour brightness so just be careful messing with them (really bad on my W7000 and based on how many lumens that UK chromapure user lost...it seems the HW40 is not much different ). It's pretty tricky and the adjustments you make, your eye can't see, that's why you must use a meter. It's a pretty hard technique to get down as each adjustment seems to affect the other....takes a long time to calibrate. I'm still a novice at it that's why I'm reluctant to use my system...I know if I do I will start changing things that appears to need no changing; that's my OCD.

It's fine to get everything to where your eye likes it but that won't mean it's accurate; which is the purpose of calibrating. I haven't measured yet but will shortly...but I will say this, out of the box the HW40 doesn't look all that different than my JVC that was professionally calibrated. None of the other projectors I've owned came close to looking as good as the HW40 out of the box.

It is a personal preference though...like audio your ears and eyes like what they like. I hate the flat frequency response that most audio people go for...I like more of a house curve. It's not accurate but my ears like it!

Just be careful not to kill them lumens. The biggest advantage of the HW40....good looking lumens!
 
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