Price

Having just rather optimistically described the VPL-XW8100ES as ‘remotely affordable’, its price of £25999 in the UK, €25999 in Europe and a particularly eye-watering $35999.99 in the US (up from a $31999 launch price, presumably because of tariffs) is probably more than you were hoping.

Such figures aren’t actually out of the way for high-end home theatre projectors, and the Bravia Projector 9’s performance is in a whole different world to the projectors you get at the sort of £4k – £6k level that represents the upper end of the mainstream projector market.

The Bravia Projector 9 ‘s main rival is JVC’s DLA-NZ900, with its contrast-rich D-ILA technology, similar triple laser lighting system, and highly customisable image set up system. The NZ900 sells for £1000 less than the XW8100ES in the UK and a whopping $6000 less in the US, though its Euro price is the same.

Design

• Fairly compact for such a high-end projector
• 13-piece, nearly all-glass lens
• Backlight remote control

Compared with the JVC’s hulking DLA-NZ900, the Sony VPL-XW8100ES is a cutie. Especially if you opt for the white version than the black option I had in for review.

It weighs only just over half as much as its JVC rival (handy if you’re thinking of mounting it on your home cinema room’s ceiling), and it wears its relatively compact by high-end home theatre projector standards dimensions of 460(w) x 210(h) and 517(d)mm unusually attractively thanks to its gabled roof-style top edge, squared off sides, appealingly robust matt finish and the metallic ring wrapped around the centrally mounted lens.

That lens enjoys a pleasingly substantial 70mm aperture and is made from 13 different elements – 12 of which are glass. This ‘Advanced Crisp Focus’ lens design, to use Sony’s own terminology, bodes well for making sure that the XW8100ES’s native 4K resolution will actually emerge intact onto your screen having passed through the projector’s optical engine.

The lens supports fully motorised focus, zoom and image shifting, as you would expect at this level of the market. The expansive 2.1x optical zoom and ability to shift the image over a strikingly extensive range of movement both horizontally and vertically make it easy to get the XW8100ES’s images in the right place on your screen without any need to fall back on image-distorting digital keystone correction.

Striking grilled finishes applied to the projector’s front and rear sides aren’t there to inject a bit of variety into the XW8100ES’s design. They’re a visible reminder of the clever venting system Sony has tucked into the XW8100ES’s chassis to help dispose of the heat created by its laser lighting system without creating much fan noise.

The XW8100ES’s connections are placed under a ledge on the XW8100ES’s side, and include two HDMI inputs, an RS232C control port, a 12V trigger output, a wired infrared control extender input, a LAN port and a USB service port.

This is all fairly typical for a premium home theatre projector, but the XW8100ES delivers one really welcome improvement over the connectivity of its XW7000ES predecessor that finds its HDMI ports able to take in 4K/120Hz gaming feeds. No longer are PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and high-end PC owners limited to 60Hz gaming on Sony projectors.

While the Bravia Projector 9 carries a few basic control buttons on its left hand side, for the vast majority of the time you’ll be controlling it via its included remote control. So it’s great to find this one of the more user-friendly handsets in the projector world, as its large size enables it to provide the sort of large, well-spaced button layout you really want to be dealing with when you’re trying to use a projector in a potentially dark room. The buttons are backlit, too.

Features

• Sony’s XR For Projector processing
• Dynamic Tone Mapping for HDR
• 4K/120Hz gaming playback

As you would hope of a projector costing tens of thousands of pounds, the Bravia Projector 9 doesn’t hold back on its features and specifications.

Particularly important are the core elements of its projection engine. These kick off with a new SXRD chipset that delivers a native 4K resolution pixel count on a chip that’s 0.61 inches across. Fitting so many pixels in such a small area should make the images produced look denser and sharper than on the previous larger chipset, due to the smaller pixel pitch.

The light that feeds the SXRD chipset comes from a premium triple laser arrangement capable of delivering pictures for at least 20,000 hours of maintenance-free life, and with 3,400 lumens of peak brightness.

That’s a very high brightness number for a home theatre projector designed for installation in dedicated (and so blacked out) home theatre rooms, and will hopefully contribute to an unusually compelling high dynamic range playback experience. The JVC DLA-NZ900 tops out at 3,300 lumens by comparison, while the previous XW7000ES had a maximum brightness of 3,200 lumens.

The XW8100ES’s HDR support includes HDR10 and HLG HDR formats. It’s a shame if not exactly a surprise it doesn’t extend its support to the HDR10+ or Dolby Vision HDR formats, which add extra scene-by-scene picture information to deliver more accurate HDR results. The JVC NZ900, by comparison, provides HDR10+ support.

The previously mentioned HDMI support for 4K/120Hz gaming feeds from the latest premium consoles and PC cards is a hugely welcome if overdue development.

Seeing today’s 4K HDR graphics writ large with the buttery smoothness only 120Hz frame rates can deliver at the sort of epic screen sizes the Bravia Projector 9 is literally made for will hopefully prove to be a gaming experience the like of which you’ve never had before. Especially as the projector is capable of getting input lag down to just 21ms with a 60Hz feed and 12.8ms at 120Hz.

Powering the XW8100ES’s performance is an all new version of Sony’s XR for Projectors processing system. Arguably the single most important element of this processor is Sony’s first true Dynamic Tone Mapping system for projectors.

The Dynamic HDR Enhancer system found on Sony’s previous premium projector generation did an actually very clever and effective job of boosting bright parts of HDR images without damaging the look of dark areas – but it wasn’t a true dynamic tone mapping system designed from top to bottom to translate incoming HDR images to take best advantage of the XW8100ES’s specific image capabilities while respecting the source’s original mastering values.

The XR processor also takes charge of an XR Triluminos Pro colour reproduction system that’s claimed to be capable of delivering a billion colour tones and covering a claimed 95% of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum. This is an extremely promising colour claim for a projector that doesn’t need to deploy a brightness-reducing extra colour filter.

Given how bright the Bravia Projector 9 can get, it’s a relief to find the XR processor powering an XR Deep Black feature designed to ensure that dark scenes enjoy convincing black colours. This manipulates the light output coming from the laser lighting system, building on the previous Dynamic HDR Enhancer engine that did such a clever job of combining bright highlights with good black levels on the XW7000ES.

As a true 4K projector, the XW8100ES needs to upconvert HD and SD sources to the projector’s resolution – and this again proves to be a key part/strength of the XR For Projectors processing.

The brainpower required to add the huge number of pixels to the picture required to turn HD and SD into 4K actually feels like pretty small beer compared with the cleverness Sony’s latest projector processing can throw in many of its picture presets at subtly manipulating images so that they take on a more life-like, three-dimensional appearance in line with the way our eyes perceive the real world.

As we’ll see in the Performance part of the review, this works so well that it becomes one of the XW8100ES’s biggest selling points.

Wrapping up the XW8100ES’s most exciting features are a new Gamma correction system which, unlike the same feature on its predecessor, can be used with HDR as well as SDR sources; improved support for ‘blanking out’ the borders of different aspect ratios that now includes support for 2.4:1-ratio films; and a live colour enhancer feature capable of punching out more vibrant colour tones without losing track of the colour balance and emotional intent of a source’s colour presentation.

So significant does Sony deem this latter feature that it’s one of just two major performance-related differences between the XW8100ES and Sony’s £10,000 cheaper XW6100ES projector – the other difference being that the cheaper model is rated as producing 700 lumens less peak brightness.

While the Bravia Projector 9 improves in almost every way on the specification of its XW7000ES predecessor, there is actually one feature that it’s lost: 3D support. The number of people likely to be troubled by this is fairly small, but there are certainly still some 3D fans out there.

And it’s a feature you can still enjoy on the JVC NZ900, albeit only if you add an optional 3D transmitter kit.

Performance

• Outstanding HDR punch and vibrancy
• Exceptional clipping control
• Excellent depth and sharpness

While I’ve seen plenty of impressive projectors over the years, I can’t recall ever testing one that’s given me such an instant ‘wow’ as the XW8100ES.

I kicked my tests off with the bloody fight against a snowy backdrop that opens Deadpool & Wolverine on 4K Blu-ray, and I’ve simply never seen another other projector deliver this sequence – or any other really bright HDR scene – with so much intensity and pure brightness.

The snow looks as bright and white as real snow, and the feeling you get of looking through a huge window at a real scene unfolding outside is more intense than anything I’ve experienced with a projector before.

It’s not just the pure brightness that makes the Bravia Projector 9 such an instant HDR star. The intense sharpness, detail and clarity of its true 4K images also massively enhances the sense that you’re gawping at a real ultra-violent mass murder being carried out by a wise-cracking nut job right outside your home theatre room.

The smaller SXRD chips Sony enhances this sense of clarity and detail, ensuring you never feel remotely aware of any sort of visible pixel structure in the image. Even if you push images well above 150 inches in size they retain a beautifully cinematic finish.

There’s nothing forced about the native 4K image’s sharpness either; while the XR For Projectors processing is undoubtedly doing things behind the scenes to maximise the image quality (unless you choose the XW8100ES’s Reference preset), it does its work so intelligently and with so much understanding of what AV fans want from home cinema imagery that you just feel its benefits without feeling distracted by any unwanted side effects like grittiness or stressy object edging.

The quality of the XR For Projector’s workings doesn’t end there. It also clearly enhances the sense of depth in its images, regardless of whether they’re showing a large-scale scene such as the woodland where Deadpool eviscerates, decapitates and emasculates so many opponents during Deadpool & Wolverine’s opening credits, or an intimate interior scene.

And again, it does so in a completely natural way that doesn’t cause seemingly any unwanted side effects. For me this depth-enhancement effect of Sony’s XR processing is so effective that it joins the extreme HDR brightness in becoming one of the XW8100ES’s most unique and irresistible selling points.

Sony’s processing is also able to apply motion processing in the mildest settings of its MotionFlow options that can take the edge off judder with 24p films without making the results look processed or ‘soap opera’ smooth too, as well as excelling yet again when it comes to upscaling sub-4K sources to the pristine native 4K pixel count.

In the TV world, the sort of high brightness the Bravia Projector 9 delivers relative to its peers can be accompanied by rather washed out colours. That emphatically does not happen with this Sony projector.

The rich reds of Deadpool’s costume against the white snow pop off the screen with phenomenal impact, for instance, while the vibrant hues of Inside Out 2 on 4K Blu-ray have never looked more vivid and satisfying on a projector.

It should be stressed there’s nothing gaudy or forced about the XW8100ES’s gorgeous colour performance. It also adapts perfectly well to subtler colours such as skin tones or shifting greys in a cloudy sky without leaving anything feeling unnatural or coarse, and the overall impact of all these richer than normal tones feels balanced and authentic.

The new Dynamic Tone Mapping system ensures there’s even less of an issue with the sort of clipping effect (lost subtle shading) in the brightest parts of HDR pictures than with the JVC NZ9000.

In the very unlikely event that you find the XW8100ES’s default image preset a little too much, the Reference setting strips everything back and slightly dulls/reins in every aspect of the picture to deliver accurate picture results without the need for a professional calibration.

I honestly suspect that most users, even pretty die-hard home cinephiles, will be more than content to stick with a perhaps marginally tweaked version of one of the XW8100ES’s relatively bright and vivid presets rather than always reaching for the Reference mode.

As hoped, the XW8100ES’s phenomenal brightness, colour response and sharpness joins forces with its outstandingly low input lag in its game mode to make it an epic and ultra-responsive big screen gaming experience.

Delving into Skyrim or Oblivion takes on a whole new level of immersion at the sort of screen sizes and with the sort of richness but also precision the XW8100ES can deliver.

It’s a relief to find that despite its high brightness, the XW8100ES also typically delivers good black levels by projector standards. Dark scenes look convincing enough to feel like natural, believable partners for a film’s brighter scenes, especially as Sony’s projector does a great job of bringing out subtle shading details in even the darkest picture areas.

That said, black level response is one area where the JVC NZ900 does clearly outperform the Sony XW8100ES. The ability to make black colours actually look black has long been a unique advantage of JVC’s D-ILA technology, and even the outstanding adaptive laser abilities of the Bravia Projector 9 can’t compete.

My only significant complaint about the XW8100ES’s picture performance is that black levels can grey over quite noticeably if a mostly dark HDR shot happens to contain a very bright section in its midst. Though mercifully, movie moments that cause this to happen tend to be pretty rare.

Should you buy it?

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