The VW 675-ES is here. I've figured out all the lens shift stuff. That works a treat.
Spent some time aligning the panels to get rid of the red/blue ghosts and fine tuned the focus. That part is good. Also the lens throw is much wider, enabling me to fill the screen top to bottom.
The part that fell significantly below my expectations is the brightness, or lack thereof. It's about 2/3 as bright on "high" mode as my decade old IN82 that has over 2000 hours on the original lamp, when in "low" mode. It's so dim in fact that I have problems with ambient light from a computer monitor at the back of the room that I never noticed with the InFocus IN82 because that picture was always bright enough to swamp any ambient light.
The lamp on this Sony has just shy of 2600 hours on it, about what my old projector has, but the brightness isn't anywhere near that of the IN82. Certainly nowhere needed to do HDR and not enough for 3D.
The unit arrived in "high" lamp mode and with the contrast set to max. No matter which mode I use, including "bright TV", I can't get the eye popping brightness of the old projector. And the color gamut isn't any better, either, which surprised me for a PJ that's supposed to handle HDR content.
Is this REALLY 1800 lumens? Next to the 1500 lumens of the IN82, it doesn't seem like more than 600 lumens. The lack of brightness and the lack of color gamut are very disappointing. I realize it's a store demo and I got it for half price of the list price, but even so, it doesn't seem like I'm getting $7500 worth of picture here. When the IN82 is projecting, the whole room lights up like someone opened a window. But the 675 ES is like dim twilight.
Could it be that the lamp is minutes away from expiring? Usually HP lamps turn pink when they're dying. My old PJ is still very bright with over 2000 hours on the lamp. Maybe this lamp is only putting out 500-600 lumens for some reason?
At the moment, I'm driving it with my editing workstation NLE playing DCI 4K footage that I shot in its native 1.9:1 aspect. The other thing that is driving me nuts is that when I shut off the projector and turn it on later on, the computer goes bonkers. All of the monitors connected to it blank out for a minute and when they come back on, my desktop has moved to the projector and my Wacom tablet mapping is mapped to the projector screen and my NLE app has moved from the 'main' display to the projector. My old projector didn't upset the computer when I switched it on or off. This is a major problem for me because it means that I have to use the keyboard to position the app window back to the main monitor and then I have open the Wacom driver app and reassign the active tablet area back to the computer's main display. The whole process takes about ten minutes once I get the hang of it, but it shouldn't be happening in the first place.