PRODUCT REVIEW: OCTOBER 22, 2007
Sanyo PLV-Z2000 Home Theater LCD Projector
This ain’t your father’s PLV-Z5, baby…
Sanyo’s PLV-series projectors have been very popular since the first model (PLV-Z1) was introduced six years ago. From those humble beginnings (remember quarter-HD resolution?), we’ve seen the line evolve to full 720p HD resolution (PLV-Z2), higher contrast and DVI support (PLV-Z3), HDMI support and a motorized lens cover (PLV-Z4), and a super-quiet fan and improved color rendering (PLV-Z5).
Now, Sanyo has taken the jump to 1080p resolution, and what a jump. Right out of the box, you can see the PLV-Z2000 is very, very different, with its all-white case, low-profile control buttons, and hideaway lens cover. It’s clear that this product is aimed at a higher level of home theater installation.
Figure 1. Sanyo’s PLV-Z2000 is very upscale in appearance from previous models.
Figure 2. Hey, where’s the lens hiding?
Sanyo also has a new color management system on-board, known as Topaz Real HD. This system lets you select any color in a still image and tweak its saturation, hue, and gamma (hence the “3D” function). Those values will be saved for that color every time it appears.
The projector is also the beneficiary of a new Durable Inorganic Optical System. In an LCD projector, organic dichroic layers and dye layers can fade away with time, in particular the blue channel. Inorganic layers are more expensive to manufacture, but much more stable at high temperatures.
Even with all this, Sanyo has kept the retail price to a very-reasonable $2,995, which is probably a smart idea considering the competition is not too much pricier and $3,000 seems to be the low target price for 3LCD 1080p projectors these days.
OUT OF THE BOX
As I just mentioned, the styling on this projector is more reminiscent of Vidikron than it is traditional Sanyo. This is the first compact projector I’ve seen from Sanyo that had a matte white finish, and what a contrast that presents to the dark blue Mitsubishi HC6000 I was reviewing at the same time.
The supplied lens has a zoom ratio of 2:1, which is easier to install in a front projection application where considerable lens shift is required. Both horizontal and vertical lens shift are included, along with a locking switch. You can yank the image 50% to the right or left, or up and down, to get the image centered where you want it.
The imaging panels for Sanyo’s first shot at 1080p are the latest Epson .74” 1920x1080 designs, similar to what other 3LCD home theater boxes are using these days. You’ll also find also a dynamic iris function with multiple speed settings to yank those black levels down, a multitude of gamma and picture presets, and plenty of user adjustments.
Figure 3. Here’s the connector panel. Alas, there’s still no 12V screen trigger or RS232 interface.
The connector line-up should take care of everything you need in your theater. In addition to the single composite and S-video jacks, you’ll find two rows of component YPbPr connectors, a 15-pin VGA jack, and a pair of HDMI 1.3 inputs. Unfortunately, there’s no 12V screen trigger, nor is there an RS232 interface — just a DIN-style jack marked “service port.”
REMOTE AND MENUS
The Sanyo remotes just keep getting better. This year’s model is a bit beefier than the PLV-Z5 design, but retains the large buttons, strong backlight, and direct access to the most important projector functions.
You can access any of the seven video inputs directly, and jump right to four basic image adjustments (brightness, contrast, color saturation, and sharpness), cycle through the five factory color temperature settings — or use your own — and choose from one of seven User image presets.
The projection lamp, a 165 watt short-arc type, has four operating modes — Full, A1, A2, and economy. You will see some extension of lamp life as a result, with a 35% drop in brightness from the highest to lowest settings. The cooling fan is very quiet and runs at a slightly harder setting with the lamp full on.
For tweaking your images, you can play with eight different aspect ratios when viewing 480i or 480p signals and four with 720p and 1080i/p HD signals. These include Full, Full Through, two Natural Wide modes, Normal, Normal through (pixel-for pixel), Zoom, and Caption In. There are slight differences between the wide and zoom modes, and you’ll have to experiment to get the correct one for anamorphic stretching.
Sanyo has provided numerous factory picture settings, but there are only a few you’ll want to use for home theater setups, as you’ll see shortly. There are three Cinema modes — Brilliant Cinema, Creative Cinema, and Pure Cinema. All three set the nominal color temperature around D6000 (Warm 1 color temperature) and two of them provide adequate brightness for the typical theater
Pure Cinema produces a very dim image and is not suitable for very large screens, unless you’ve got ambient light levels down to almost zero. The Natural setting is somewhat brighter and a good starting point for viewing TV shows and sports. The three remaining settings — Living, Dynamic, and Vivid — are just too bright for my taste and require considerable tweaking to warm up the color temperature.
Your best bet for calibration is to start in one of the Cinema modes and work from there. Of the five color temperature settings, Warm 1 will get you closest to D6500, while Warm 2 will put you in the ballpark of D5400. With seven User memories, you can fiddle endlessly and save your tweaks until you find the ones you want to keep.
In user color temperature mode, you can adjust red, green, and blue contrast and brightness, although with LCD projectors, adjusting the former settings usually means big changes in the latter, and vice-versa. (They just don’t tune up like cathode ray tubes running in Class AB mode.)
Want to set your own gamma? Sanyo gives you nine steps of gamma correction for each color channel, which should be the minimum for any home theater projector. There’s also an automatic gamma setting (on/off), three levels of black stretch (raises low-level detail luminance values), contrast enhancement, and noise reduction on/off.
The iris function is adjustable in two ways. First, you can set the depth of “black” for this control, with the factory default somewhere around –60. Secondly, you can choose which mode the iris operates in — Fast, Fixed, and Normal (off). I went with Fast mode for my video image quality tests.
The Topaz color management system is intriguing, but you must keep in mind that colors on red and blue laser DVDs — not to mention movies and live TV shows — are coded to specific color gamuts, like SMPTE-C or ITU.709. You can experiment with the 3D color system, but you may then be creating color shades or luminance values that don’t exist in the source material.
ON THE TEST BENCH
For my tests, I started with Natural mode and full lamp power to take my “factory settings” measurements and moved on to calibrations. Test sources included HD cable, terrestrial HD signals, HD DVD and Blu-ray content, scaled red laser DVDs, and test patterns from my AccuPel test generator.
My first pass analysis with ColorFacts 6.0 showed a wide color gamut, wider than any I’d ever seen from a Sanyo projector. However, I also got a nasty S-curve gamma plot, indicating the projector was clipping the high end of a 10-step grayscale. Sanyo claims this projector can produce 1200 lumens, but you don’t want to run it anywhere near that hot in a darkened room.
Instead, I calibrated the projector for best grayscale reproduction, this time in Creative Cinema mode. And what a difference it made! Brightness dropped to a reasonable 385 ANSI lumens, with an outstanding 85% brightness uniformity score. More importantly, the gamma curve (Figure 3) cleaned up beautifully, plotting to 2.6 — the standard for digital cinema.
Figure 4. Once you tune up the projector, you’ll see nice gamma curves like the red one.
Figure 5. Once the PLV-Z2000 hits 20 IRE, it stays within 600 degrees to full white.
Brightness ranged from a low of 278 lumens in Pure Cinema mode (a little too dark for my 82” screen) to a very chilly (blue) 830 lumens in Vivid image mode. I have no doubt the projector can go a lot brighter, but the resulting gamma curves would be pretty ugly.
Contrast numbers were strong. I measured average contrast at 364:1 and peak contrast at 533:1. For comparison, the PLV-Z5 delivered numbers of 326:1 ANSI and 438:1 peak, so there’s a slight improvement in black levels. (The dynamic iris was shut down for these tests.)
As for color temperature measurements, the projector exhibited a maximum shift of 475 degrees across a full white field — not great, but acceptable. I performed three different gamma and color temperature tweaks and plotted two of them against the factory Warm 1 setting in Figure 4.
The initial factory calibration had a shift of 1072 degrees from 20 IRE to 100 IRE, which is too wide and probably a consequence of the white crush seen from the S-shaped gamma curve. Dialing back to a more reasonable brightness, contrast, and gamma setting provided more consistency, with a maximum excursion of 599 degrees from 20 to 100.
Now for that expanded color gamut (Figure 6). Sanyo’s press release for the PLV-Z2000 says it supports Extended Color through its HDMI 1.3 inputs, and judging by Figures 5a and 5b, I’ve have to say there’s truth in the marketing. The PLV-Z2000 can cover 100% of the REC.709 color space and most of the DCI space, with some correction in cyan required to pull up the blue point and shift the green away from yellow.
Figure 6. Sanyo’s got gamut if you want it — enough to hit 90% of the DCI standard.
VIDEO IMAGE QUALITY
The contrast and brightness are there, the gamma curves can be cleaned up, and the color gamut is plenty wide. Where Sanyo has come up short is in video image processing; in particular, de-interlacing and conversion to progressive scan.
The PLV-Z2000 failed many of the Realta HQV test patterns, in particular the rotating bar and waving flag sequences. There were enough jagged lines and edges to be distracting, and no combination of settings would clean things up. 3:2 (film mode) detection was fast and reliable, however, and the mixed video/film caption tests were clean of artifacts.
Things were better with the HD DVD Realta tests. Both the video and film resolution loss tests were smoother than I expected, although I should say that 1080i images looked a tad soft. Some of the smaller multiburst patterns in the film resolution test had a distinctive green color shift, which could indicate a bandwidth issue.
Sure enough, I swept the projector with high-frequency multibursts and saw banding at 18.5 and 37.5 MHz using a 1080i pattern, and banding at 37.5 MHz with a 720p pattern. More significantly, I saw a chroma phase reversal on the 37.5 MHz patterns in both modes, and that could account for the color shift in a monochrome test pattern.
My recommendation is to use a scaling DVD player or outboard scaler to jump from 480i or 480p to 1080p. You will see a noticeable improvement in image crispness as a result. Also, if you have a blue-laser DVD player equipped with progressive output mode (1080p/60), feed that signal to the PLV-Z2000 for best video quality.
Movies and TV shows with lots of saturated colors (like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and CSI: Miami) will really pop, and I mean POP on this projector. Live sports, primetime HDTV shows, and video games will be a delight to watch, and you’ll think you’re looking at a much more expensive projection system.
The weakness of the PLV-Z2000 is with low luminance levels. Once again, I loaded up an HD DVD of Batman Begins and skipped right to the nighttime chase scene in the Batmobile. While flesh tones and subtle color shades held up well, black levels weren’t as low as I’d like, even with the iris set in fast mode. Good, but not great.
CONCLUSIONS
Sanyo has come a long way from the first PLV-series projector, and the PLV-Z2000 is a definite step up from the Z5 in form and function. While the price can’t be beat for everything you get, but I wish Sanyo had included better video image processing, such as the Faroudja/Genesis chipset that OPPO builds into their $200 1080p scaling DVD players.
Otherwise, the projector has outstanding color performance and tracks a pretty clean grayscale once you tune it up. Drive it with native 1080p content and/or a high-quality video scaler, and you’ll be happier than a clam. (Memo to Sanyo — add a 12V screen trigger and RS232 port to the next generation…)
