By Kevin Miller, CNET.com
02/03/2009
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/home_av/projectors/0,39037571,44582797p,00.htm

The front projection category continues to grow and become more affordable to the masses. These days you can get a decent 1080p front projector for cheaper than most 60-inch plasma TVs. Of course, you do have the additional cost of a screen to factor in, but that screen can be much bigger than 60 inches. Enter Sanyo's PLV-Z3000 1080p resolution projector. It has a nice feature package for fine-tuning picture quality and good connectivity options. It should be mated with a relatively small screen, no larger than 92 inches depending on the material, as it is not very bright after it has been properly set up. Otherwise, it offers commendable picture quality for the money.

Design

As far as design goes, the PLV-Z3000 is quite basic and won't win any industrial design awards. At its price, you really shouldn't expect Ferrari design flare. Our review sample was a square black box--and that was that. All the video connections are on the rear panel, and the lens shift wheels are on one side of the chassis, the air intake and outtake vents are on the other side.

The remote control is a smart design with a backlight. It is well-laid out and makes one-hand operation easy and fluid. There are direct access keys for all the inputs, image modes, and picture controls. The onscreen menu has seven pages of options vertically arrayed, and we found it simple and intuitive to navigate.

Features

The PLV-Z3000 has a nice feature set. To help with installation issues, it has horizontal and vertical lens shift which makes centering the picture a snap if it is placed reasonably accurately on the ceiling in relation to the screen. We were pleased that Sanyo did not include keystone correction, which wreaks havoc on picture quality by reducing resolution and introducing unwanted artifacts.

There are six selectable picture modes in the Image menu: Brilliant Cinema, Creative Cinema, Pure Cinema, Natural, Living, Dynamic and x.v.Color. We chose Natural instead of one of the Cinema modes because the Cinema modes were far too dim. Five selectable color temperatures are also onboard: Default, Low 1, Low 2, High 1 and High 2. We chose Low 2 as it came closest to D65 broadcast color temperature standard. When we were done calibrating grayscale, the setting changed to User.

All of the iris adjustments are in the Advanced Menu. We kept the iris fixed and set it at -20 for the best compromise between adequate light output and compelling blacks. The rest of the items in the Advanced menu should be turned off for the best performance: Auto Black Stretch, Transient Improvement, Color Management, Smooth Motion, and Dynamic Gamma.

The PLV-Z3000 is one of the few projectors in the market with a 100Hz refresh rate. According to Sanyo, this lets the unit properly reproduce the frame rate of film-based material from 50Hz sources, such as high-definition TV shows broadcast in 1080i that originated on film, in a process known as 5:5 pull-down. For 1080p24 sources, the projector refreshes at 96Hz, which should again allow preservation of the proper 24p frame rate.

It's important to note that the Sanyo lacks the kind of dejudder processing found on most 100Hz flat-panel LCDs, for example. If you're looking for that extra-smooth, video-like effect, you'll have to look elsewhere. There is a "Smooth" setting available in the menu, but as far as we could see, it had no effect. That's a good thing in our opinion; we always turn off dejudder processing.

Connectivity options are quite generous enough for a front projector in this category. Two HDMI inputs head the list as the most important connections followed by two component-videos, an S-video, a composite-video and a VGA port for computer hookup. There is no serial interface for control via a touch-panel remote system.

Performance

Overall performance is reasonably good for a projector in this price range. However, the Sony VPL-HW10 we previously reviewed outperforms the PLV-Z3000 in most areas of picture quality.

Our biggest complaints with the Sanyo involve the inaccurate primary and secondary colors, especially red and green, and the lack of light output. Our recommendation to address the latter would be to use a 1.3 gain screen material and not go any larger than 92 inches diagonally. This will give you enough light output for a high-contrast, snappy picture. Grayscale tracking in the Low 2 color temperature is fairly close to the specification of the D65, and there are red, green, and blue global gain controls that can be used by a qualified technician with the right equipment to fine-tune the grayscale.

As stated above, the primary colors are way off, especially red and green, and by extension, the secondary colors are off as well. The green especially showed up in regular program material as looking quite limey or neony. While Sanyo does have a Color Management System onboard, it doesn't work well at all.

Video processing isn't bad for an entry-level projector such as this. It does roll off some of the high-frequency video, which means you lose a little resolution; however, it passed all the HQV Benchmark tests on that Blu-ray disc. The full-time onboard 100Hz processing works well compared with other solutions we have seen from Sony and Epson, and it appears to preserve the frame rate of film as advertised.

The opening scene of The Dark Knight on Blu-ray, filmed in IMAX and presented in the 16:9 widescreen format, looked pretty crisp with good color saturation. However, the outdoor sections of this scene were not quite bright enough on our Stewart Filmscreen Grayhawk RS screen that measures 80 x 45 inches. Later in Chapter 5 of the disc, in a conference room at Wayne Enterprises with about a dozen people, we could see that skin tones looked reasonably natural.

For a black-level torture test, we choose Planet Earth, specifically the Caves section at the beginning of disc one. A few minutes in, the picture goes pitch black for a second or two before a rock face with water cascading down it seems to pop out of nowhere and is suspended in blackness. This scene was rendered very well by the PLV-Z3000, with little or no low-level noise or contouring artifacts.

Green was so far off that it became painfully obvious in certain program material. A perfect example of this is at 26:05 in the Caves section of Planet Earth where there are large beds of green seaweed. On the PLV-Z3000, they looked positively neon lime. Unfortunately, if Sanyo were to get the primary colors right, light output would be further reduced because a wider gamut green is a big contributor to overall light output.