Sony Bravia Projector 9 (VPL-XW8100ES) review

Premium home cinema projectors such as the Sony Bravia Projector 9 are facing a double threat these days. On the one hand, we’re suddenly seeing a massive surge in the availability of affordable and, in some cases, startlingly good king-sized TVs, while on the other we’ve got brands currently fighting like rats in a sack to deliver convincing HDR projectors for relative peanuts.

Can a projector as expensive as the Bravia Projector 9 (AKA the VPL-XW8100ES) really still make a case for itself in such a newly competitive home theatre world?

Price

At the risk of labouring the point, we have no choice but to lead with the cold fact that Sony’s Bravia Projector 9 will set you back £25,999 / $31,999. That’s a new car, multiple holidays of a lifetime, a fun afternoon with a personal shopping assistant at Tiffany’s… In short, the Bravia Projector 9 is clearly going to be out of reach for anyone who’s even remotely financially challenged.

We’ve been around the AV block enough times, though, to know that more often than not, if you want the absolute finest home theatre experiences you just have to pay for them. And our experience to date has also shown that arguably no projector brands tend to reward you more for reaching high than Sony and its arch-rival JVC.

Rivals for a projector of the Projector 9’s stature aren’t exactly common, but two more affordable models (well, it’s all relative, isn’t it?) that spring to mind are JVC’s excellent (great black levels but less bright) DLA-NZ800, and Sony’s own Bravia Projector 8 (VPL-XW6100ES) which loses 700 lumens of brightness and a Live Colour Enhancer system compared to the Projector 9.

Design

The Projector 9 sports essentially the same design as its predecessor, the 2022-launched XW7000ES. There’s the same sort of vaguely elliptical shape but with squared-off sides and angular widest points, the same grilled front edge, the same centrally mounted lens, and the same longer-than-it-is-wide proportions.

The Projector 9 is both smaller and significantly lighter than your average premium 4K projector, making it relatively easy to install (especially in a ceiling mount position) in your home theatre room. We guess its relatively compact shape and high brightness compared with its Sony predecessors potentially opens up the possibility of it also being used in more ‘living room’ like environments. We’d strongly argue, though, that the brightness is more about optimising performance with today’s HDR content rather than combatting ambient light. If you’ve spent this much on a projector you really should be looking to house it in a room that can achieve almost commercial cinema levels of darkness.

Features

As you’d hope for its money, the Bravia Projector 9 pulls precious few specification and feature punches. For starters, and actually very unusually for the home projection world, it carries a true, native 4K resolution, where the SXRD imaging chip actually carries a full 4K count of ‘pixels’. There’s no need here for the pixel shifting or multiple mirror flashing shenanigans used by many rival ‘4K’ projectors.

The latest Projector 9 fits its native 4K pixel count onto an SXRD chip that’s just 0.61 inches across, too, potentially making the image look even denser and sharper than those of Sony’s previous 4K projectors.

The Projector 9’s UHD pixels are illuminated by a premium tri-laser lighting system that ups the peak brightness output to 3400 lumens from the 3200 lumens possible with its XW700ES predecessor. This lighting system is rated to 20,000 hours of uninterrupted movie viewing. That’s enough for 10,000 two-hour films. Or 5000 extended Lord Of The Rings cuts.

To ensure as little of the Projector 9’s image quality potential as possible is lost in the journey through its optical system, the lens jutting out from its front edge is a premium 13-piece Advanced Crisp Focus affair, comprising one plastic and 12 glass elements, with a 70mm aspherical front lens and support for a wide-ranging 1:1.35-2.84 throw ratio. The lens can also be shifted +/- 85 per cent vertically, or +/-36 per cent horizontally, and supports a very healthy 2.1x level of zoom. All of its adjustments are motorised, too, meaning there’s no need to get off your seat to get the image perfectly positioned on your screen.

The Bravia 9’s connections, meanwhile, enjoy a very significant (and long-awaited) upgrade from those of the XW7000ES, as its two HDMI ports finally move on from their previous 4K/60Hz sticking point to take in the 4K/120Hz feeds now available from such gaming sources as the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5 and relatively powerful PC graphics cards.

This step up in refresh rate support has unexpectedly come at the expense of the support for 3D enjoyed on previous premium Sony projectors. We guess if something really had to give, though, then more people would rather have the 4K/120Hz support than 3D, given the dwindling number of 3D films being released these days.

The Bravia Projector 9’s optics are driven by a new XR For Projectors processor that leans into the much-lauded processing of Sony’s most recent TVs to deliver a wealth of new features and enhancements. Perhaps the most important of which is Sony’s first proper Dynamic Tone Mapping system for optimising incoming high dynamic range to the projector’s considerable capabilities. Sony’s previous HDR optimising system for projectors did a startlingly good job of adding vibrancy and contrast to HDR images, but the introduction of a true tone mapping system that properly tracks (and so respects) the core values of the source material will be very welcome to the sort of AV enthusiast happy to invest so much money in a home cinema set-up.

The new XR processor also runs an XR Deep Black feature that controls the light output of the lasers so that dark scenes can enjoy richer black colours while bright scenes look more vibrant and punchy. This feature is clever enough, too, to boost gain in bright parts of mostly dark pictures despite generally dimming the image to enhance black levels.

The Projector 9’s XR Triluminos Pro system is on hand to infuse pictures with a claimed one billion colour tones, the range of which is reckoned to cover 95 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour gamut used in the creation of most HDR content.

A native 4K resolution means sub-4K sources need to be properly upscaled, which is achieved on the XW8100ES by an XR Clear Image process that combines frame-by-frame object analysis with advanced noise detection and removal to deliver 4K upscales that look cleaner, crisper and more richly textured. Good upscaling is especially important, of course, when you’re talking about pictures that can get as large as 200 inches across.

The Projector 9 is also the beneficiary of the subtle way Sony’s XR processing can rework images around depth mapping and focus point analysis to give them a more three-dimensional impression designed to closer replicate the way our eyes see the real world.

With a model such as the Projector 9 often likely to form part of a calibrated home theatre installation, Sony has seen fit to add beyond the spec of preceding models a gamma correction system for HDR where its predecessor only had one for SDR; improved blanking support for 2.40:1 aspect ratio films; and keystone correction to help get image edges straight even in the most awkwardly shaped rooms. Even though this latter feature should seldom be needed given the amount of optical image shifting the projector supports.

One last feature of the Projector 9 to cover is its Live Colour Enhancer feature. Designed to produce richer, more vivid colour saturations without, crucially, departing too far from the balance between colour tones established in the original image master. Sony puts such great store in this feature that it joins the extra 700 lumens of extra brightness as being one of only two features that sets the Projector 9 apart from the much cheaper Projector 8.

Picture

While the Projector 9’s brilliance doesn’t come even remotely cheap, it does actually manage to make the high price of entry look very much worth it.

As hoped, for instance, the new dynamic tone mapping has every bit as transformational an effect on the Projector 9’s playback of high dynamic range images as it did when JVC added it to its previous generation of D-ILA home theatre projectors. Now, you really feel as if every HDR frame is benefitting from every last drop of picture potential Sony’s projector has to offer – and that potential is truly prodigious.

Under the dynamic tone mapping’s influence, Sony’s claim of an extra 200 lumens of brightness over the XW7000ES actually seems conservative. Whether it’s the genuinely daylight feel produced with HDR exteriors or the fearsome intensity of smaller bright HDR highlights, the Projector 9 delivers the lighter end of the HDR spectrum more compellingly and convincingly than any projector we’ve seen short of insanely expensive, large venue-focused ‘light cannons’ such as Sony’s own GTZ-380 or Sim2’s Nero4S Gold. It’s actually easy to forget while watching the Projector 9, even as people who review countless televisions, that HDR was very much developed with TVs rather than projectors in mind.

Good HDR isn’t only about the bright end of the light spectrum, though. So it’s awesome to see that the Projector 9’s extra brightness hasn’t for the most part compromised Sony’s impressive knack for black level and contrast. Dark scenes typically avoid the sort of infusion of greyness that would leave them looking flat and unconvincing, while the amount of shadow detail the projector is able to pick out of even the darkest corner (without over-brightening such areas to the point where they start to reveal noise) is fantastic.

The addition of true dynamic tone mapping has merely enhanced the sense that somehow – even though it’s technically impossible – Sony has managed to get a degree of local light control into the Projector 9’s pictures.

The Projector 9’s colour handling also improves substantially on its already outstanding predecessor. In the Film 1 preset in particular, the palette enjoys a phenomenal combination of volume and richness, but also almost seemingly infinite subtlety. Sony’s claims that the Projector 9 covers 95 per cent of the DCI-P3 digital cinema colour range appear entirely credible.

In many of the Projector 9’s presets the new XR for Projectors processor works the same sort of magic on colour that it does with Sony’s latest premium TVs to enhance the sense of depth. In fact, the effect – which is designed to better replicate the way our eyes view the real world – is even more pronounced and effective at the sort of epic image sizes Sony’s projector can give you than it is on Sony’s TVs, making film and game worlds feel even more immediate, immersive and intense. Especially if you also leave the projector’s Reality Creation processing on, which subtly adds more definition and apparent density to the projector’s portrayal of even 4K images.

Sony’s new projector processing engine also does a stellar job of upconverting HD sources to the Projector 9’s native 4K resolution. With decent quality HD sources, in fact, you can easily forget you’re not watching a 4K source, despite the epic size of the Projector 9’s images leaving potential upscaling flaws nowhere to hide.

We realise that the sort of image processing we’ve been lauding over the previous paragraphs sounds as if it runs counter to the kind of processing-free experience purist home cinema fans may be looking for. But even Dynamic Tone Mapping is a processing/image manipulation system of sorts, and many serious AV fans have now embraced that, especially with high-end projectors. And if it comes down in the end to seeing being believing, then our experience from having spent many hours watching films in the Projector 9’s Film 1 and Film 2 modes and its essentially processing-free Reference mode is that the Film modes are simply much more enjoyable and engaging to watch, with neither of them really doing anything that might suddenly distract you or throw you out of whatever you’re watching. In fact, if anything the ‘pure’ Reference picture setting proves more distracting to watch thanks to how much less bright and dynamic it looks.

Obviously, there are still lots of premium attributes to the Reference picture, especially when it comes to the clarity achieved through the projector’s native 4K resolution. But the image no longer really feels like something that might justify the monstrous outlay – whereas the Film 1 mode, in particular, certainly does.

Aside from the underwhelming Reference preset, the only other issue we have with the Projector 9 is that occasionally its extreme brightness (by projector standards) can cause its typically good black levels to take a hit with shots that contain a fairly large and very bright highlight against a very dark backdrop. The sudden infusion of greyness only lasts as long as the high contrast shot, and more often than not the intensity of the bright highlight is sufficient to divert your attention away from the arrival of a little dark-area greyness. But it’s a rare reminder that for all the genius of its light control algorithms, the Projector 9 joins all other current projectors in ultimately not actually supporting physical local lighting controls.

This little issue also lets us bring in the fact that JVC’s D-ILA projectors, such as the wonderful DLA-NZ800, outperform the Sony Projector 9 in terms of black level. Something to bear in mind, certainly, if black level and absolute black level consistency is your ‘thing’. But the Projector 9’s significant extra brightness gives it more HDR impact overall, especially with favourite bright HDR scenes such as the opening snow-backed fight of Deadpool & Wolverine.

The Projector 9’s intensity, brightness and incredible clarity also make it an extraordinary big-screen gaming experience, backed up by a very good – especially by projector standards – 21ms of input lag with 60p sources and just 12ms with 120p games. Losing ourselves in beautiful adventure titles such as Indiana Jones And The Great Circle and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla on the Projector 9 also underline a key final point about it that we didn’t give enough credence to in describing its video performance: just how much bigger its pictures can go than even the biggest remotely affordable TV. Getting above 150 inches and more won’t even cause it to break a sweat. In fact, the limitations of your room are much more likely to limit the scale of your Projector 9 experience than anything about the projector’s specifications.

Verdict

We don’t mind admitting that we’ve fallen head over heels in love with the Sony Projector 9. Its picture quality is truly, madly, transportively magnificent, enjoying levels of detail, colour volume, brightness and three-dimensionality, especially with HDR visuals, that we’ve just never seen before.

Our love is kind of unrequited, we guess, thanks to our inability to get our hands on the sort of money we need to buy a Projector 9. But if that’s not a problem for you and you have a place in your house capable of doing full justice to its brilliance, the Projector 9 is as close to a ‘no brainer’ as a £27K product has ever been.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Build 4
• Features 5

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