PRODUCT REVIEW: DECEMBER 2008
Sanyo PLV-Z3000 3LCD Home Theater Projector
Sanyo’s latest 3LCD home theater projector shows just how far the technology has come — and where it can go.
The PLV-Z3000 carries on a long lineage of affordable 3LCD projectors from Sanyo, going all the way back to the company’s ¼-HD resolution PLV-Z1. (Wow, that was a LONG time ago!)
Sanyo finally broke the 1080p barrier last year with the PLV-Z2000, and now there are three HT projectors in the line for 2009: The affordable PLV-Z60, the mid-range PLV-Z700, and the top-of-the-line PLV-Z3000.
Of course, we’re talking about a price spread from $1,300 to $3,295 across Sanyo’s HT line, which isn’t all that big. So the question is, should you spring for the extra dollars to get the Z3000? Read on, and find out.
Figure 1. Sanyo’s adopted a medium gray housing for the PLV-Z3000.
OUT OF THE BOX
Cosmetically and functionally, the PLV-Z3000 looks just like the PLV-Z2000 and its lower-priced cousin, the Z700. The outer housing is the same size and shape, and the only real difference for 2008 is the use of a darker gray cabinet, rather than a white finish.
You’ll find the same input connectors on the real panel — a pair of HDMI 1.3 input jacks, two rows of YPbPr RCA analog video jacks, one composite and one S-video jack, and a 15-pin VGA jack for computers. There’s also a DIN-style RS232 connection for remote diagnostics. And no, Virginia, there’s still no 12V screen trigger! (Every year, we keep waiting and hoping…)
The PLV-Z3000 retains the medium projection distance lens found on its predecessor, a 22.6–45.3 mm design (1.5–2:1 ratio) with manual zoom and focus controls and mechanical lens shift in both horizontal and vertical axes, adjustable from a side panel with locking thumbwheels.
It’s worth repeating why mechanical lens shift is so important. Sanyo’s lens shift provides image offset up to a full screen height above and below the centerline, plus ½ the screen width left and right of the screen’s centerline. This allows you to mount the projector quite a bit off-axis, and as long as it is level and square to the screen, you shouldn’t see any image geometry distortion, such as keystoning.
Figure 2. It’s the same rear-panel I/O lineup from the Z700.
REMOTE AND MENUS
The supplied remote is identical to that of the PLV-Z700, with direct access to the same functions and a nice backlit and user-friendly design. (I love BIG buttons on my remotes!) You’ll have direct access to just about every possible adjustment, along with all seven User image memories and the factory presets.
The operational menus are essentially identical to those found on the PLV-Z700 (check out my review for more details). But I’ll recap some of the more important adjustments.
As before, there are five color temperature presets, ranging from High 1 or 2 to Default and Low 1 or 2. If you have a color temperature meter, you’ll want to select User CT mode and proceed to the next sub-menu, where you can set red, green, and blue drive independently. (Actually, the moment you change any of the factory color temperature presets, you are automatically switched into User mode.)
Note that these are only RGB drive adjustments across all gray levels, so you’ll need to fiddle with them at the high (80%) and low (20%) range of a grayscale to reach a happy medium. And you may not be happy with the color temperature tracks you get, when all is said and done.
The fix? Go into the projector’s Advanced Menu (make sure it’s turned on first, under Settings) and be prepared to spend a few minutes fine-tuning the low and high levels of red, green, and blue, using Custom Gamma. By raising or lowering a given color luminance step, you can clean up a messy gamma curve and stabilize grayscale tracking of a given color temperature.
As I said in my review of the PLV-Z700, “…This process absolutely requires a color temperature meter that also measures luminosity. If you don’t have one, stay away!” No kidding! You’ll be stumbling around in the dark unless you can either read absolute x, y coordinates for gray values, or (better) can see an RGB histogram that shows where you have too much or too little of a given color, as you try to dial in a perfect gray.
The good news is that Custom Gamma works — and then some. In previous reviews of Sanyo HT projectors, I have noticed their inability to stay within 400 — 500 degrees of a given color temperature from black to white. Well, Custom Gamma fixes that quite nicely and will require maybe an hour of your time to do so, if you have decent instrumentation.
Speaking of gamma, you can adjust the PLV-Z3000’s gamma curves high or low independently of any factory presets. However, a change of just one increment makes a change of several points along the curve. Start with values of –1 or –2 to get closer to video gamma (target 2.2), moving to –3 to –5 to achieve film gamma (target 2.5 to 2.6).
In the basic image adjustment menu, the Progressive setting should normally be left in Auto mode, where it will detect video (2:2) and film (3:2) cadences automatically. Now, Sanyo has added two more bells and whistles in the Advanced menu that provide multiple levels of smooth motion correction.
A unique 5:5 pull-down circuit “bumps” 3:2 content up and interpolates additional frames to achieve better motion during the conversion process. Sanyo calls this circuit Dynamic Predictive Frame Interpolation, and it converts 3:2 cadences to 6:4, then tosses one of the extra doubled “3” fields and replaces it with a doubled and interpolated “2” field.
The result? Each frame of film converted to video appears as 5 sub-frames that contain interpolated motion. (If you guessed that the projector is refreshing video frames at 120 Hz, you win the cigar!)
The second enhancement, Smooth Motion, goes through a similar process to minimize motion judder and can be set to three levels, plus off. I can tell you from previous experience with these circuits that while they do work very well, they convert a traditional film look to more of a video look, something you may or may not like in the final analysis.
There’s also a brand new mechanical iris design in the Z3000, one that’s fast enough to keep up with 60Hz video. It resembles two flags that spin in and out of the light path in a circular fashion. Combined with a new optical compensating plate from Seiko Epson, the result should be much deeper blacks and higher contrast. You can set it to Mode 1 to favor brightness, while Mode 2 favors contrast. Or, you can just leave it off completely, as I did for my tests. (You may not even miss it.)
Figure 3. Here’s the PLV-Z3000’s gamma curve performance, before calibration and afterwards.
ON THE TEST BENCH
I spent quite a while calibrating the PLV-Z3000, just to see how much I could squeeze out of the Custom Gamma adjustments and improve the projector’s dynamic range. For my tests, the zoom lens was set to its midpoint, about ten feet from my Stewart 82-inch matte finish screen. I also set lens offset close to zero horizontally, with 25% positive offset vertically.
Because I was playing around with Sanyo’s Custom Gamma adjustments for so long, I managed to accumulate about four dozen luminance, RGB, and color temperature histograms and now have a pretty good feel for what this projector’s capable of in terms of brightness, contrast, and gamma performance.
When all tuned up, expect brightness readings of 320 to 350 ANSI lumens in modes you’d normally use to watch movies and TV shows in a darkened room, like Brilliant and Creative Cinema, and Natural.
Need more brightness? You can start with Sanyo’s Living factory preset mode, do an extensive calibration, and wind up with over 500 lumens on the screen, although you may not be as thrilled with black levels at that point. Brightness uniformity from the 165-watt short-arc lamp was excellent, averaging 85% to the average corner and 76% to the worst corner.
How about contrast? I should state here that the projector’s audio iris was disabled (fixed) for all of my measurements, and that dynamic gamma and contrast enhancement were also shut off. Even so, I measured ANSI (average) contrast at 473:1, with peak contrast from the same checkerboard pattern at 809:1.
To put it simply, those are mind-boggling numbers for any 3LCD projector. The projector’s 50/50 contrast performance was consistently high, ranging from 480:1 in Brilliant Cinema mode to 607:1 in Pure Cinema mode. (Which begs the question: Who needs an iris?)
Although Sanyo provides several factory image presets, I wasn’t too thrilled with the gamma performance for most of them. Figure 3 compares the factory Brilliant Cinema setting with my tune-up jobs that originally started in Natural and Living modes. Notice that while I managed to get more photons onto the screen, I kept cleaner gamma curves while doing it.
And how about color temperature performance? Using just the RGB drive controls, you can achieve a respectable color temperature track. But dive into the Custom Gamma menu, and you’ll be amazed at how things tighten up. Check out Figure 4 to see the factory Brilliant Cinema color temperature track, compared to my two calibration tracks — one for film gamma (2.6) and one for video gamma (2.24).
Figure 4. Using the RGB drive and Custom Gamma settings,
you can make the PLV-Z3000 track a very clean grayscale.
Figure 5. The projector’s color gamut is wide enough
to take in almost all of the P3 digital cinema color space.
Another thing that impressed me was the PLV-Z3000’s color gamut, shown in Figure 5. It’s easily big enough to cover the BT.709 HDTV color space, and also takes in most of the P3 digital cinema color space. Now, all we need is Blu-ray movies coded with extended color bits for the P3 digital cinema color space. (Oops, I forgot — Blu-ray is only an 8-bit system…)
VIDEO QUALITY
For these tests, I focused on a couple of things. First, shadow detail rendering, along with color accuracy at low gray levels, and secondly, how motion blur was handled in the PLV-Z3000.
For the first test, I ran several “dark” Blu-ray discs through the projector, including Batman Begins and Mission Impossible III, plus a couple of “dark” HDTV shows — CSI, and Ghost Whisperer. Once again, I left the iris fixed and just went with whatever blacks I could get out of the projector. And they were black indeed, although not inky-black — but as good if not better than the “black” I often see on release prints in movie theaters.
Black is one thing; contrast another, but maintaining good color saturation and consistent white balance across a white range of gray tones is the biggest challenge for 3LCD projectors. Right away, I noticed how well subtle flesh tones and pastel color shades held up at all levels of brightness. (Skin tones are an excellent test of a projector’s capabilities.) And there was plenty of shadow detail to be seen 90% of the time.
You can get even deeper blacks with the iris, but you’ll have to experiment with the lower level settings so you don’t notice a drop-off in image brightness. The human eye can easily detect a change of one f-stop in brightness up or down. With that in mind, I’d suggest setting the lower level of the iris to cut light levels no more than ½ an f-stop, or about 25%. That should provide deeper blacks, yet not prove a distraction with brighter text or objects on dark backgrounds that suddenly appear much dimmer.
Live fast motion sequences (Fox 720p and CBS and NBC 1080i football) looked fine, although I didn’t see as much of a reduction in motion blur as I expected with the smoothing circuit. It and the 5:5 processor have more of an impact on filmed (24p) content.
Set the smoothing to Medium or High, and virtually all film judder disappears — it’s spooky, and disquieting. Check out Chapter 8 of MI III (the Vatican reception scene) where you’ll see this effect at its eerie best — the sequence looks like it was shot with a 60 fps camera.
TV shows shot film style, like CSI and Ghost Whisperer, combine that built-in judder motion artifact with interlaced artifacts. 5:5 processing, in conjunction with a “medium” smoothing setting, work wonders with fast motion on these types of shows.
Of course, there’s no benefit to the 5:5 circuit when feeding your projector native 1080p/24. In that case, the processor converts the image to a 96 Hz 4:4 process, refreshing each image four times. Add in some smooth motion processing, and once again, you could be looking at video footage. It’s scary…
CONCLUSIONS
Sanyo’s PLV-Z3000 is a big step up from the Z2000, and oddly enough, only a small part of the improvement comes from the new iris system. As you have just seen; even with the iris circuit disabled, the projector has 30% higher contrast and better gamma and black level performance than the Z2000, and it tracks a much tighter grayscale.
The motion image enhancements also work very well, although you may not want to take all of the judder out of 24p content — it just looks weird...smooth, but weird. If you’re going to watch cable or satellite HD movie channels using the 1080i signal format, leave the 5:5 option turned on, though — it goes beyond normal image processors to fix 3:2 cadence problems.
Now, to answer my earlier question: Should you spring for the extra
dollars to get the Z3000? Absolutely. Out of the box, it’s a good performer.
With some additional tuning, it turns into a great performer that holds
its own against any 3LCD or single-chip DLP model.
