Sanyo PLV-Z3000 review

Performance
Overall performance is reasonably good for a projector in this price range. However, for about $600 more, the Sony VPL-HW10 we reviewed last November outperforms the 3000 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 diagonal (80-inches wide by 45-inches high). 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 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. Check out the bottom of this blog post for picture settings.

Color decoding looked accurate for Rec. 709 HD sources, although it is difficult to be certain without a color isolation feature, which very few projectors at any price have as of yet. 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 120Hz 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 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-inches wide by 45-inches high. 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 3000, 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 look 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.

How we test TVs.