Rumors were floating around for several days before the show, and Sony confirmed them at their press conference on Wednesday: they introduced a new 1080p SXRD front projector, the VPL-VW50, with a list price of $4999, half the price of the VPL-VW100! How did they do that? For one thing, the lamp is a 200W UHP rather than a 400W xenon, though it actually puts out 900 lumens, compared with 800 from the VW100. Other factors include improved manufacturing efficiencies and the fact that it’s half the size and weight of its predecessor.

The VW50 can accept 1080p/24 (say, from Sony’s BDP-S1 Blu-ray player, due in October), which it displays at 96Hz (each frame four times). If it gets 1080i/60 from a film-based source—that is, with 3:2 pulldown—it removes the unpaired fields and displays 1080p/60: one frame twice, the next three times, the next twice, and so on. This is better than motion-adaptive deinterlacing, but better still would be displaying each frame three or four times at 72 or 96Hz. Still, this looks like a DLP killer at half the price (or less) of 1080p projectors using that technology.

NOW we have the complete review. Is the Sony VPL-VW50 the killer 1080p projector we thought it might be?