Official Sony VPL-VW95ES Owners Thread - Page 109

I'm in the same boat - I'm still very happy with the images that the 95ES throws (combined with the Darbee).

I always hope for improvements, and would like to see Sony come up with a successor, but I don't think I'd buy for myself unless it was significantly improved (like double the native contrast or something).

Otherwise, I'll echo the author above - I'm expecting my next upgrade may be to a 4K unit. That's at least a year away, maybe two, dependent upon what progress is made in terms of projectors and the availability of 4K media at the time. I won't be upgrading to a 4k projector if media is just trickling out.

Last year I believe the 95ES came out some months after the HW30, so it's still possible that Sony has another model to be released. If so, they've been pretty quiet about it.

Im extremely happy with mine too............ I just have these bad dreams about a 1000ES

dj

I'd be in this club if Sony would get the AVS b-stock orders processed! I'm looking forward to a nice upgrade from my RS-1 + Darbee to the 95ES + Darbee (and 3D).

 

I have to add my 2 cents as too I am delighted in my upgrade from RS20 to the VW95 + Darbee on a 130x51 scope screen, room is a bat cave.

 

3D isn't an interest until glasses free 3D is available and as far as PQ,  I think it will take 4K with 4K source material for me to justify selling my VW95.  I really don't expect all that to happen for another 2 or 3 years to when black levels are equal or better and more than a couple of 4K movies are available and 4K pj in the sub 15K range.  At least this will help keep a harness on the upgraditis beast for a short while.

How many hours do you have on your lamps? Mine is about 600h and i'm thinking (i didn't measured it) the brightness is lowering... What are your expirence?

Despite hardly using it over the last four months, I'm up to about 1000 hours. The bulb has dimmed some (I want to say about 15%, but that's going off memory from my first measurement - I can't find where I recorded the brightness). After the initial calibration I performed two subsequent calibrations, and each time I pulled out a bit more blue and green. Still quite minor compared to my experiences with the JVC previous-generation bulbs. I think I'm currently running at -11 and -13 for blue and green, or something around there.

After 1000 hours, I'd say there's still lots of life left in this bulb.

I have around 480 hours on my lamp, I run it on high, and project onto a 1.1 CW 120x51 for scope movies and scale it down to 1.78 for hdtv, this is in a batcave room.  When it was calibrated it was outputting a little over 14 lamberts(?) as measured off the screen.  I don't have calibration skills or equipment, but the brightness seems to be only minimally changed.  My approach though is that the moment I start to notice that it is losing that 'pop' on different BR and HDTV programs I won't hesitate to replace the lamp.  The cost of the lamp is really not much for the enjoyment this pj can provide when running on all 8 cylinders.  I played the tightwade with delaying replacing the lamp on my RS20 and boy do I regret it, thinking that the dimmer picture was still pretty good, the lamp had 1100 hours on it, until I finally opened the purse strings and replaced it, WOW...what a big improvement and regretting I didn't do it much sooner, not this time around though.

Which lamp is used in the VW95? LMP-H201 right?
Edited by RioBar4U - 10/27/12 at 12:57am

I had about 800 hours on mine, after nearly 1 year owning. On low lamp, after about hour 650, there was a flicker that switching back to high lamp wouldn't stop. So I left it on high lamp all the time, which wasn't a big deal because even on high lamp, the fan isn't that loud. Anyway, I decided to buy a new lamp, and start running that, using the lamp with 800 hrs as my backup. Even at 800 hours, 3d was pretty watchable, but I suspect it will be even better with the new lamp. And I like having the low lamp option again without flicker. I bought through AVS, and with their prices, I don't mind if I replace the bulb every year to keep the projector near it's maximum performance. I suspect that if I want to stretch the bulb, it would be ok for about 2000 hours. But I'll probably never bother stretching the bulb that far, as I'm using a 1.0 gain screen, 100 inches, and the projector is mounted as far back from the screen as possible.

Thank you...

I have an issue...

I'm watching on demand (HD) and the video quality is really off.

The motion looks fake and it looks like really low budget quality. I'm watching sons of Anarchy and I watched the first 4 seasons on DVD.

I have played with motion enhancer and nothing is helping.

It's tough for me to describe the issue other then it looks fake and really low budget.

I'm sure part of the issue is the feed but i'm sure there might be a setting to make it more film like.

Other then that... love this projector!!

Has anybody had any success on the VPL-VW95 to get the IR in jack to work? I have tried mono minijack connectors , stereo minijack , tried the tip, the inner in conjunction with the common with no success. I would prefer this over running a IR repeater as its a little less messy and should be be the better option. I cant believe Sony would go and do it differently from the rest of the manufacturers out there.

After a lot of frustrating testing i found the problem. The IR in is not a true IR in as we know it but a sony S control input. I managed to send an IR no carrier signal via the input and now it works.

New owner of a VW95 here as well (old PJ is an JVC RS2).
I was comparing a X70 with a VW95 the whole weekend. Will post more details later.

Looking forward to your impressions Nima. I have an RS45 but had an RS2 just last year. The HW50 and RS46 are on my list but the VW95 is still something to consider. Please post your thoughts on the black level differences. Motion ill most certainly look much better as for me the RS45 was a nice upgrade when it comes to motion but the Sony should even be better.

Sorry for the late response but I was busy setting everything up and I also had to move the PJ 2m forward into the room because I had not realized that the Sony has a smaller zoom-factor than the JVC and I wanted to be able to zoom from scope to 16:9.

Basically I can reflect all the positve feedback the Sony has gotten in this thread. The X70 I had was pre-calibrated by the dealer (using a Minolta CS200) but exhibited some very bad blue coloring in the lower IREs. Without the use of the CMS the greyscale was fine but colors were not - even in THX mode the JVC looked washed out.

Convergence and sharpness were also not perfect on the JVC. Maybe that was the reason why I did not notice a big impact of the eShift either (and I am sitting at 3,4m in front of a HP 3,2m scope screen).

Even if the JVC had been perfect it would still have been a close call or a draw in my opinion. My VW95 has perfect convergence, with almost no fringing and excellent sharpness.

I did some extensive A/B with both PJs, projecting the same image and covered one lens or the other. Yes the JVC has some better blacks but not that you would notice as a night and day difference. In order to get the most contrast out of the X70 I had to close the iris but this made the image to dark and flat looking - even on my HP screen.

The Sony on the other hand has very good colors and greyscale out of the box. Motion as already mentioned by others was also much better. In a nutshell the Sony had more pop to its picture, both in dark and bright scenes.

For instance C3PO in EPIV just shined and looked all perfectly golden with the VW95 whereas the JVC diplayed the colors flat and dull, same with the armor of Jango Fett in EPII. Also in EPIII the fights in outer space looked terrific with the Sony, the laser beams and blasts looked so colorful.

Shadow detail is another huge plus of the Sony. I was able to see so many subtle details in dark scenes. The JVC on the other had crushed black pretty heavily out of the box and I was not able to fully resolve the 2-3 lower bars on the AVS 709 test pattern (also mentioned in the RS55 thread).

Adding the Darbee to the VW95 was fantastic, it already did a lot (at HD 40%) with my old JVC RS2 but with the VW95 because it is so sharp it takes it to a whole new level. Gandalf's beard in FOTR looked so real for instance (the scene where he arrives in front of Frodo).

In a nutshell I am very happy with my decision and I got the VW95 for a little more than the list price of a HW50 or an X35. I also saw the Sony 1000 at the dealer! Let me just say that my jaw dropped several feet.

FWIW - I have seen the 1000. It was VERY impressive, VERY large, VERY heavy, and VERY expensive!

However, with the 50es and the new 95es replacement coming out in a few months, I question if the 1000 is worth the money. Too many improvements being made too quickly after the 1000 was released, Will the 95 es+ (or whatever it will be called) be 'so close' to PQ of the 1000 that the 1000 is not worth it? What size screen do you need to fully appreciate the 1000?

One of the things that I was NOT impressed in the 1000 was it wasn't a light cannon. For that size of a unit and that price point, I expected more brightness. Don't get me wrong, it was nice - but I am not sure I would have too much larger than a 120" screen for this.

I have not seen the 95es (and, of course, not its replacement) but I am thinking the replacement will probably be 'good enough' for at least my purposes, and far more affordable.

Right now, I am holding off until the 95es replacement details and reviews are forthcoming...

It that never happens, or final specs aren't that impressive, I would probably get the 50es.
Edited by Steve Benkin - 11/13/12 at 7:38am

Probably the biggest difference between the VW95 and VW1000 hardware-wise is the lens. The lens on the 1000 is very expensive and along with the 4K upscaling makes for the superior PQ. I'm sure it is in another league than my VW95 which I remain very happy with. Personally I'd rather sit on my hands another couple of years when I anticipate being able to buy a machine with similar capabilities and qualities at prices more in-line with street on the VW95. Hopefully they will find a way to make it smaller and lighter as well.

Do you rather use Auto Iris 1 or Iris 2? I find Iris 2 more consistent.

@LovingDVD didn't you want to measure the effects of Gamma in the Iris settings? How about tweaking the RegClose settings, was that beneficial in retrospect? Should I bother?

Thanks,
N.

Ya know, I really can't quite remember.

As I recall, I tried to gauge the effect that reg open/close had on a small window pattern brightness - not to measure gamma per-se, but to try and gauge the impact these settings were having on brightness so I could try and find the sweet spot for dynamic iris tweaking. So by definition I guess you could say this was measuring gamma, but not for normal purposes, so I did not actually map the results back to gamma but rather absolute brightness.

Its funny you should bring this up because recently I've been thinking about the tweaks I made and how i made them - starting to think ahead to the possibility of upgrading in the future, perhaps to the VW95 replacement, and hoping I could remember the tricks I used to set it so that it could be applied to my next Sony... Fortunately I'm pretty sure I reported my original and tweaked settings somewhere in this thread so that may serve as a good reminder. I recommend searching this thread for my postings on the subject if you are looking for ideas. I do know that whatever I came up with at that point was great and its exactly how I have been running since then and love the result.

 

I agree, my vw95 for my 120x51 screen in a batcave is absolutely amazing especially with the Darbee.  I'm not into 3D, at least not until they come with a glasses free version, and until 4K source material becomes available I can't justify leaving the quality of the vw95 behind for a 4K pj.

FWIW Nima

I did measure the gamma ( setting off ) and with iris off, auto 1 and 2 - iris off ( and gamma setting off ) it was about 2.25 IIRC, in auto 1, it did get a ugly drop in gamma and did make a strange gamma curve ( I thing, I posted the result in this tread !?, so you can go back and look ) , but the auto 2 behave very fine, and did just change the gamma to around 2.35 - wich is very fine for my black "hole" - so Im using the auto 2 too

I dont think you can trust gamma measurement 100%, when measured with an auto iris on ( because it will open/close depending a little on the scene´s generel light output ) , but visual it has working flawless and produced a nice picture the last 800 hours

dj

Right - if you measure it, it looks pretty messed up. But I can never spot anything abnormal looking about the gamma or picture for that matter, except for occasional noticeable brightening or darkening with a scene, and that's only because I have the iris so aggressive.

BTW guys - on another note, I'm up to about 420 hours and still have only lost less than 5% of the bulb's brightness.

Settings lock?

Is there a setting in the menu on the VW95 that will lock all the settings so that someone doesn't muck with anything? I looked in the menu, but didn't see anything. Oddly I thought I saw a settings lock in the HW50 screen shots, but can't recall for sure.

Guys, a noob question here. My throw distance from projector lens to screen is 11 feet. I have played around on projectorcentral.com with the calculator but don't like the results Any ways I can squeeze a 100" or 106" diagonal screen from 11 feet with this projector? Thanks for your help.

Go to this website and select the Sony 95: http://www.eliteprojectorcalculator.com/

The results are accurate.

Thank for the website. It looks like the Sony 95 will work in my case. I am at about maximum zoom to get to 106" screen from a short throw of around 11 feet. One other question for you.

Will I be able to use the vertical shift so I can keep the projector in the ceiling versus mounting it to a pole? What is the maximum vertical shift for this projector? Thanks for your help.
Edited by ModestHT - 11/19/12 at 10:26am

maybe this has been asked before, but is the existing 95es viewed as being a better buy than the new 50 es?