The What: Sony Electronics' two newest WUXGA 3LCD laser projectors, the VPL-FHZ85 and VPL-FHZ80, combine brightness with efficiency, installation flexibility and advanced operational capabilities. The VPL-FHZ85's size and weight make it the smallest and lightest in the mid-range projector class, according to the company. The capable new models are a reliable option for a wide range of corporate, education, faith and e-sports applications.
The What Else: The VPL-FHZ85 and VPL-FHZ80 incorporate a number of features that contribute to the excellent picture quality. The projectors offer high brightness—the VPL-FHZ85 at 7,300 lumens (8,000 lumens center) and the VPL-FHZ80 at 6,000 lumens (6,500 lumens center)—which delivers rich imagery and satisfies demanding lighting conditions and environments.
With the incorporation of Sony's Reality Creation real-time signal processing, mapping and analysis technology, the projectors produce crisp and clear pictures for effective presentation and display. Additionally, both new models support 4K60P input for compatibility with 4K video sources. This is further amplified by Reality Creation's ability to enhance the overall sharpness, resolution and quality of the imagery, regardless of whether it's pictures, graphs or text. The projectors' new Reality Text feature improves text-based presentation materials by providing clearer letters and lines with enhanced legibility.
The projectors also feature advanced Intelligent Settings, which offer optimization based on usage environment. The addition of customized Bright View functionality enables colors to accurately maintain their contrast and vivacity, even in brightly lit rooms. The new Ambiance feature automatically measures the room's brightness using an ambient light sensor, and further calibrates the Bright View, color gain and Reality Creation settings accordingly. Additionally, the new models offer an automated filter cleaning system and an efficient cooling system to ensure long-term, reliable and low-maintenance operation.
The Bottom Line: The ergonomic and compact projectors offer a sophisticated, blend-in design that can accommodate a range of lenses and enable a widest-in-class vertical lens shift, at 70 percent. The versatile models adapt to diverse installation and usage environments, as well as mounting configurations. Their installation flexibility is further realized through thoughtful additions like a USB power supply for enabling wireless presentations, auto power on capabilities, auto input selection and a data cloning feature that allows a user to copy a projector's settings onto a USB drive for easy replication to additional projectors. The new projectors are planned to be available in January 2022.
