When you need every last lumen, the VPL-HW65ES can put out almost 1800 lumens, but with really good color at over 1500 lumens. Between Bright Cinema and Bright TV, Bright Cinema measures brighter, but has less pop - that is, a touch more natural. Bright TV despite the lower lumens has other settings going for it, that make it slightly favored when dealing with a chunk of ambient light.

Judged solely on picture quality, the Sony VPL-HW45ES 1080p SXRD projector didn’t offer any significant improvement over the preceding VPL-HW40ES, but that’s no criticism since the latter was already so good anyway. Helped by impressive blacks, accurate colours and fluid motion handling, the HW45 therefore replaces the HW40 as our number one choice among projectors priced under £2,000.

The best way to conclude this review is by stating the obvious. If you want accurate cinematic images with decent blacks, good shadow detail and stunningly accurate colours for under £2,000 there is no other choice to be made. No, it is not perfect and there are compromises to be made with the environment it needs to be used in and it is not 4K UHD ready. It's also not future-proofed for HDR material or the new UHD Blu-ray format. But for 99% of your HD viewing via streaming or disc formats in a normal blacked out living room the Sony HW45ES is quite exceptional in terms of value for money versus performance and is the most compelling big screen projector for the masses we have seen in a long time. If you can wait a few more years for 4K UHD standards to settle and the technology to trickle into the projector market, the Sony HW45ES is the perfect stop gap. It’s a best buy!

The Sony HW45ES is a very high-end home entertainment projector featuring super deep black levels, up to 1.6x manual zoom, and phenomenal picture quality for home cinema use. While it costs a pretty penny and isn’t very suited for bright rooms, as a home theater projector, it’s very, very difficult to beat.

For the most part, the VPL-HW45ES is exceptionally friendly to set up. The combination of a large 1.6x optical zoom and simple horizontal and vertical image-shifting wheels make it a doddle to get your image in the right place on your wall or screen, no matter how awkwardly shaped your room.

The Sony VPL-HW45ES doesn't do 4K, but for the best in 1080 with the option for 3D, it's a great choice.

With all of today’s hullabaloo about 4K and HDR, it’s easy to forget that there’s something special about a theater-like image on a big projection screen—even if it’s plain vanilla, standard dynamic range, and 1080p. One look at the Sony VPL-HW45ES will remind you of that fact.

For $1999 the Sony VPL-HW45ES is a stand out performer for both dedicated home theater and less formal home entertainment and video gaming in low ambient light. It is bright enough in its video optimized mode for up to a 120" diagonal image with moderate ambient light or up to a 190" image in theater-dark lighting. It delivers vibrant color, dark blacks, and the full range of subtle gradations to give 2D images a three dimensional look; it offers a long list of video processing features to let you adjust the image to taste; it's quiet enough to make fan noise a non-issue; it supports full HD 3D; and its 22 ms lag time is very fast compared to most home theater projectors.

From the moment we switched on this Sony we could tell we were on to a winner, and that notion never wavered