Sony projectors and uniformity

[ericglo]

I haven't really thought about this in a long time until the other day. A well known calibrator friend said that Sony still has an issue with field uniformity over 75% of the time.  To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I thought Sony had reduced this problem in the last couple of years. Apparently not.

[Dylan Seeger]

Jeff Meier, pro calibrator, also confirms he has seen this issue on recent models including the 5000ES. I think Sony needs a complete overhaul of their SXRD chips, light engine and supporting electronics.

[ericglo]

Interesting, I wonder how many potential Sony owners know the probability of receiving a bad unit.

[AVSCraig]

Interesting, I wonder how many potential Sony owners know the probability of receiving a bad unit.

I think most people don't know what to even look for. 

[Zebra]

Sony isn't unique in this respect. Most projectors don't have perfect uniformity. 75% sounds bad in isolation but you won't find significantly different results with most other projectors in that class. 

I think people can spend a bit too long worrying about projector specs they would have been unaware of, had they not read about it. If you can't notice a problem when you're watching, it usually doesn't matter. 

If it makes you feel better, you hear the same complaints with OLED tvs but my 77" LG delights me every time I use it.

[DavidHir]

Sony isn't unique in this respect. Most projectors don't have perfect uniformity. 75% sounds bad in isolation but you won't find significantly different results with most other projectors in that class.

I think people can spend a bit too long worrying about projector specs they would have been unaware of, had they not read about it. If you can't notice a problem when you're watching, it usually doesn't matter.

If it makes you feel better, you hear the same complaints with OLED tvs but my 77" LG delights me every time I use it.

The JVCs generally have outstanding grey uniformity and much better than Sonys.

[Dylan Seeger]

White field non uniformity is not great on the Sony 4Ks. It's easily visible when an all white image is on screen. Out of all the LCD based projection technologies, it's the worst by a decent margin. With shades of grey, if you don't disable the fine pixel convergence software in the service menu (something most people aren't going to do), you get artifacts like this with the right video content:

Sony projectors and uniformity

With that said, no display is perfect. The 4K JVCs do have black field uniformity issues, ie "bright corners". Though I'd argue white field non uniformity is going to be visible with real world video content more often.

[alangouger]

The larger cinema Sonys which use a 1.48" imager ship with a camera that monitors the projector's uniformity and runs an automated procedure keeping it in check. There are additional adjustments that help maintain contrast over time. 

[Dylan Seeger]

The larger cinema Sonys which use a 1.48" imager ship with a camera that monitors the projector's uniformity and runs an automated procedure keeping it in check. There are additional adjustments that help maintain contrast over time.

The non uniformity was just the tip of the iceberg for Sony. The cheaper ones featuring the .74" SXRD panels also suffered from panel degradation resulting in massive contrast loss, lumen loss, gamma droop and worsening problems with uniformity. Not only this but these cheaper SXRD projectors have issues with banding and posterization, as if the panels can't be fed enough data bandwidth necessary to create an image without quality loss. And these problems have been around since the 1000ES was released 9 years ago. Sony never addressed them.

[alangouger]

banding and posterization

That is a shame. Cinema projector have a full 12-bit video path, no bottleneck. You will never see banding unless it is in the source.
On the downside, most cinema projectors are too costly, too noisy and too large for the typical HT
enthusiast.

[rob-houston]

The larger cinema Sonys which use a 1.48" imager ship with a camera that monitors the projector's uniformity and runs an automated procedure keeping it in check. There are additional adjustments that help maintain contrast over time.

Camera? You mean Sony can spy on what you watch?