Sanyo PLV-Z3000

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, good connectivity options, and is quite inexpensive. 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 setup. 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. However, at its price, you shouldn't expect Ferrari design flare. Our review sample was a square black box--and that is that. All the video connections are on the rear panel, and the lens shift wheels are on one side of the chassis and 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-handed 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 package. 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 does 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 the broadcast standard color temperature of D65, and when we were done calibrating the grayscale, it 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 on the market with a 120Hz refresh rate. According to Sanyo, the refresh rate lets the unit properly reproduce the frame rate of film-based material from 60Hz sources, such as high-definition TV shows broadcast in 1080i that originated on film, in a process known as 5:5 pull-down. For 1080p/24 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 120Hz 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 video inputs, an S-Video input, a composite video input, and a VGA style RGB input for computer hookup. There is no RS-232 interface for control via a touch-panel remote system.