Sony has been quite active in the past several years expanding and refining their front LCD projector product line, which now includes everything from flyweight portable designs to heavy-duty “loaded-for-bear” models with multiple lamps and lens options.

The two latest entries from Sony are natural extensions of previous designs, and also reflect two trends in front projection - lightweight, high-brightness projectors that can be used installed or on a desktop, and fully featured installation projectors with lens shift, DTV compatibility, and full support for analog/digital/IP connectivity.

VPL-FX50U
Sony’s VPL-FX50U desktop/installation projector is certainly an odd-looking bird. When I first extracted it from its shipping box, visions of Captain James T. Kirk and the Starship Enterprise came to mind. The VPL-FX50U has a very unique sloping cabinet design that is unlike any other projector you’ve seen, but it is a fully functional small installation projector.

The VPL-FX50U measures a compact 18 inches wide by 6.5 inches tall and 20 inches deep, and tips the scales at just 23.1 pounds. To put that in perspective, Sony’s first serious effort at a desktop LCD projector - the 640x480 VPL-V500Q - cranked out all of 500 lumens and weighed 22 pounds, plus it was boxier than the FX50U. Today? The new VPL-FX50U is claimed to develop 3,000 ANSI lumens at XGA resolution. We’ve come a long way...

The imaging panels used in this projector are 1.3-inch 1024x768 polysilicon LCD’s with Micro Lens Array (MLA) enhancement. MLA is a grid of tiny lenses that re-focus light into each pixel of the LCD panel, and it makes a big difference in brightness. Signal compatibility runs from VGA to SXGA (1280x1024), using Sony’s Auto Picture Adjustment (APA) circuit to correctly size and center each signal. Full compatibility with 480p, 720p, and 1080i DTV is also standard, and digital keystone correction complements the vertical lens shift.

As configured, the review unit came with a 50.8-to-64-mm zoom power zoom lens, but you can also get shorter- and longer-throw lenses that are easily swapped out. You’ll have a full range of mechanical lens shift, although it hardly seems possible to have fit such a feature in the sloping housing of the VPL-FX50U. The projection lamp is a standard UHP type rated at 250 watts, and you can expect between 2,000 and 3,000 hours from it in normal service.

At first glance, the VPL-FX50U might seem to be light on input connections. Truth is; it can handle just about any computer or video signal you’d need to hook up to it. There’s the usual BNC composite and DIN S-video jacks, plus a 5xBNC jack fields that accommodates RGB signals and sync-on-green formats (YCbCr and YPbPr DTV). (The 5xBNC jacks all loop-out to an external monitor or another projector.) In addition, there’s a DVI connector for direct digital interface from a comparably equipped PC or notebook computer.

There’s one more layer of connectivity on the VPL-FX50U that isn’t readily evident, and that is the projector’s IP address. Built-in to each VPL-FX50U is a version of Windows CE, which allows you to network this projector and access it from a remote terminal. Through this interface, you can download PowerPoint and JPEG files to the projector for presentations, as well as access the startup and service menu to check lamp life and other parameters.

Not all of this IP-connectivity is fully functional yet (full-blown service diagnostics and software updates are still coming), but Sony is making a big push for IP on future products. In fact, every Sony product being made now has an IP address built-in. That includes digital cameras, video conferencing equipment, VTR’s, DVD players, and audio gear. You’ll also see wireless connectivity in the future, using the IEEE 802.11B high-bandwidth standard.

To test out the VPL-FX50U, I used a wide variety of test signals. RGB images were provided by my 800 MHz Pentium III with a 16 MB Diamond Stealth video card, as well as an Extron VTG200 test pattern generator. For video, I used segments from the Video Essentials DVD through S-video and component connections, and also hooked up a Panasonic PV-HD1000 D-VHS recorder to play back 480p, 720p, and 1080i DTV signals.

After calibrating the projector for best grayscale and setting the zoom lens to its midpoint, I measured 2,456 ANSI lumens of brightness with a 1024x768 RGB test pattern. ANSI (average) contrast measurements using a checkerboard pattern were 189:1, and peak contrast clocked in at 274:1. Brightness uniformity was very good at 87% average, and 83% to the worst corner.

The VPL-FX50U presents little color shift across the image. Color temperature was measured with a Minolta x-y meter to be 8,050 degrees K in the brightest mode. That temperature shifted by a maximum of “ 350 degrees across the image, which is outstanding performance for an LCD projector - most models do well if they can hold a maximum color temperature shift of “ 600 degrees.

In video mode, contrast was lower (as is typical with virtually all LCD projectors) and measured 133:1 ANSI and 189:1 peak. Both are acceptable numbers for video viewing, although the black levels could be better. The supplied projection lens exhibited no apparent spherical distortion - once the center of the image was focused with a fine text pattern, the entire image was in sharp focus. No pincushioning or barreling was observed when zooming the lens, although there was evidence of lens flare on certain parts of text.
I have always found MLA-equipped projectors to have a different look than conventional LCD designs. The images seem to have more “punch” due to the wider contrast, but can sometimes look grainy or too “contrasty” with video. While scenes from DVD appeared crisp, they also acquired some edge enhancement I didn’t like. Video noise was low, and color rendering was good compared to my Princeton AD3.0HD 32-inch reference CRT monitor.

If you’d like to use this projector to watch DTV signals, be forewarned - it will only accept them in the component (YPbPr) format. This means that if you use a set-top box with RGB output (like RCA’s DTC-100), you will not be able to resize the input signal to 16x9. If you use an outboard video scalar to line-double or match video to the projector’s XGA native resolution, you may need to connect the signal as YPbPr to preserve the aspect ratio on anamorphic sources.

RGB sources from my computer and the Extron VTG-200 looked sharp and crisp. The VPL-FX50U has an onboard RGB scalar that does a good job resizing lower-and higher-resolution images to fit the full imaging area. In a test of 25 different sync/scan rates from 640x400 to 1600x1280, the VPL-FX50U was able to correctly size and center 15 of the test signals and required some minor fiddling with the image adjustment menu to clean up 6 more. Only 4 signals wouldn’t display correctly, and three of them were oddball SXGA/UXGA formats.

The supplied remote control had a fairly simple keypad layout and average range. Image adjustments are pretty simple, thanks to a user-friendly pulldown menu. There’s also an accessory PCM-CIA card slot for pre-loaded PowerPoint or JPEG images, so you can leave the PC on your desk. One note - there is no on-board audio reinforcement with this projector. It’s strictly a display device, but a very functional one at that.

VPL-FE110U
Sony’s VPL-FE110U picks up where the VPL-FX50U leaves off, although you won’t find it on too many desktops - it measures 22.3 inches wide by 9.4 inches tall by 25.6 inches deep, and is no lightweight at 76 pounds (without lens). Part of the reason for that weight is the unique quad-lamp design that uses four 132-watt UHP lamps to provide better brightness uniformity and also some redundancy in case a bulb cuts loose.

The imaging panels on this projector are the biggest Sony makes - 1.8-inch 1280x1024 polysilicon panels (no MLA here) for true SXGA imaging. Signal compatibility is pretty much whatever you want to hook up, regardless of scan rate and component format (except for 480p and 720p). That includes RGB signals from VGA to UXGA, NTSC/PAL video, and YPbPr DTV formats such as 480p, 720p, and 1080i.

Connectivity is also in the “whatever you want” class. As configured, the VPL-FE110U comes with looped-through jacks for composite video (both BNC), S-video (one pair of BNCs for Y and C, and a DIN-style jack with DIN loop-outs), plus a 5xBNC jack field for all component video and RGB formats. There’s also a pair of stereo jacks on each input for audio and another pair for audio out.

Speaking of audio, the on-board amplifier is mono - not stereo, which is odd considering all the room inside the top of the shell. And that speaker is rated at five watts, although it’s hard to hear over the powerful blower used to keep that quad-stack of lamps running cool. I can’t imagine when you’d want to use the internal speaker with this projector - chances are, it will wind up installed in the ceiling and audio will be routed to a dedicated sound system.

Like its sister projector, the VPL-FE110U is also equipped with IP-connectivity. Each model of this projector can be assigned a unique IP address and placed on a local area network (LAN), capable of communicating with other IP devices like whiteboards, document cameras, notebook PC’s, and even other Sony projectors. At present, the operating interface through Windows CE is limited to downloads of PowerPoint and JPEG files, plus some basic diagnostics and service functions. This input (Input C) is also enabled with a PCM-CIA card for direct playback of stored presentations and graphics without a PC.

A full range of lenses (at last count) is available for the VPL-FE110U. For my tests, Sony sent along a VPLL-Z3020, a 1.3x zoom lens with full motorized zoom, focus, and horizontal/vertical lens shift capability. That x-y adjustment is real handy if you decide to stack a pair (or even three) of these projectors for extra brightness - you’ll be able to get precisely aligned and converged images.

My first review projector would not fire up, and the rear panel read-out indicated that one of the lamps (#2) was bad. Having no way to verify this, I asked Sony for a second lamp module - which then also registered as “bad”! Suspecting a bad connection, I removed and re-installed the lamp module, then powered up the projector anyway. Bingo - all four lamps fired up, and the “#2 lamp failure” indicator mysteriously went away. (Perhaps a brief visit from “Murphy” was to blame.)

The same test signals used for the VPL-FX50U were put to work again. After calibrating the projector for best grayscale and setting the lens to its midpoint, I measured 3,233 ANSI lumens with ANSI (average) contrast clocked at 173:1 and peak contrast measuring 271:1. This was a conservative measurement - you can easily get over 4,000 lumens from this projector, but at the expense of black levels which are higher than those seen on Sony’s 1024x768 LCD projectors.

The VPL-FE110U has good color uniformity. I measured 7,300 degrees K at normal operating brightness, with a maximum shift of -750 degrees across the image. Brightness uniformity scores were very good, measuring 75% on average and 73% to the worst corner. Not quite up to the performance of the VPL-FX50U, but still satisfactory - you won’t see any annoying hot spots or color shifts with this projector on bright images.

The supplied lens is a big assembly, and it delivers the goods. Text sharpness with both XGA and SXGA text patterns was very good to excellent, with no spherical distortion seen. The lens held its geometry while zooming, and there was no evidence of “keystoning.” I did observe a slight amount of lens flare towards the edges of the text patterns, though.

Video quality through this projector is average to very good, depending on the source and how close you sit to the screen. Test video from Video Essentials showed little noise and grain, and colors were a little under-saturated (again, that black level problem). Color rendition was good, compared to my 32-inch reference monitor. The color cast of the UHP lamps makes it difficult to get an accurate match to 6,500 K for video - there’s a little magenta that can’t be tuned out with the RGB drive and bias controls. An outboard scalar will help with improving video detail.

DTV looked okay, but I observed some pixel scaling artifacts on certain clips of 1,080i and 720p footage that I had not seen on my reference monitor. This problem occurred mostly with motion sequences - still shots, or reasonably still sequences, didn’t exhibit these artifacts. The projector prefers DTV to come in the YPbPr format for correct sizing, which is surprising for Sony - their 42-inch plasma panels aren’t nearly as fussy.
RGB images looked outstanding, as you might expect. The higher black levels aren’t as much of an issue here, since most RGB images (like PowerPoint, spreadsheets, and still images) don’t have these kinds of grayscale values. As far as scaling RGB, the VPL-FE110U did slightly better than its sister projector by correctly sizing and centering 15 of the test sync signals, and more of them required some tweaks in the image adjustment menu, and only three wouldn’t display correctly (one old sync-on-green XGA standard, and two SXGA rates - oddly enough).

The supplied remote is Sony’s famous Remote Commander, a desktop-style full-keypad design with backlighting that has average range with batteries. (Hint: Use the supplied extension cable for all adjustments, and leave the batteries in their packaging.) You’ll have direct access to virtually all projector functions from this remote, including APA, lens zoom/focus/shift, and the usual image adjustments. (Another hint - use large text patterns to set the lens focus, as the projector’s text pattern is quite small and hard to read.)

CONCLUSION
It’s hard to imagine an application for desktop or installation projection that either of these boxes couldn’t handle. In general, both models deliver the usual level of performance you’d expect from Sony. I just wish both projectors were truly format-agnostic as far as component video signals are concerned. The IP-connectivity is a neat function and will probably come in handy in the near future, as more IP-capable products come to market.

Pete Putman consults in, and writes about display technology, interfacing, and HDTV. His company, ROAM Consulting, Inc. can be found online at www.projectorexpert.com