Sony announced their top-of-the-line home theater projector for 2016. The $60,000 VPL‑W5000ES 4K SXRD laser light source projector is Sony’s first home cinema projector that features 4K resolution powered by a laser light engine. It provides 5,000 lumens of brightness, is compatible with High Dynamic Range (HDR), emulates the new BT.2020 color gamut, and covers the full DCI color space.
The VPL-VW5000ES covers the full DCI-P3 color gamut. By taking advantage of its professional calibration tools the VPL-VW5000ES allows the user to choose to emulate the BT.2020 color space, as well. This ensures compatibility with upcoming home video formats. And by bringing together high brightness, infinite dynamic contrast and the latest signal processing technology, the VPL-VW5000ES provides compatibility with High Dynamic Range (HDR), enabling the viewer to see wider ranges of contrast and colors than ever before.
Sony’s Advanced Motionflow feature reduces blur and maintains brightness and VPL-VW5000ES’ extremely fast imagers allow viewing of fast action content – especially sporting events – with great smoothness, even with 4K signals. Along with HDR and BT.2020 capabilities, the VPL-VW5000ES also includes an HDMI input that is HDCP 2.2 compatible. That same input has enough bandwidth to accept 4K 60p signals up to YCbCr 4:4:4 8bit or YCbCr 4:2:2 12bit, thus helping to ensure that the VPL-VW5000ES is prepared to handle all types of video content now and in the future.
The VPL-VW5000ES can be tilted as much as 30 degrees, allowing for flexible installations that take advantage of mirrors to place larger screens in smaller spaces, such as rear projection. Thanks to a newly developed liquid cooling system with low noise operation, the projector can also be located near viewers without impacting the enjoyment of a program’s audio. The unit ships with a standard powered lens with a zoom ratio from 1.27 to 2.73:1 and lens shift capability of +/- 80% vertical and +/- 31% horizontal.
Benefits of the VPL-VW5000ES’ laser light engine include fast on/off times with no waiting for the projector to cool down – which means you can immediately turn it back on to resume binge-watching your favorite show. The light engine delivers a long operational life with a linear decrease in brightness, so the color shifts seen with traditional lamp wear are not expected. But if the color settings do shift over time, the VPL-VW5000ES includes a built-in re-calibration function that can be used to test how much the projector has drifted from its original factory calibration and reset it.
Price and Availability
The Sony VPL-VW5000ES is available for pre-order now and is expected to ship in Spring 2016 at a suggested retail price of $60,000.
