Sanyo PLV-Z3000 – Lots of features

Pros:

• Color decoding is inaccurate
• Good connectivity
• Excellent features

Cons:

• Primary colors are inaccurate
• Low brightness

Bottom Line:

Sanyo PLV-Z3000 has a few flaws but we still recommend it looking at the low price and good feature set.

Manufacturer’s specifications:

Sanyo PLV-Z3000 is 15.7 inches wide, 13.6 inches deep, 6.1 inches high, 16.5 lbs weight. The brightness is 1200 ANSI lumens, Image Contrast Ratio is 65000:1 (dynamic), Image Size is 40.2 inches – 300 inches, Projection Distance – 4 feet – 60 feet, Throw Ratio is 1.36 – 2.76:1, Uniformity is 85 %, Resolution is 1920 x 1080 pixels, Video Bandwidth is 100 MHz, Max Sync Rate (V x H) is 100 Hz x 80 Khz, Lamp Type is UHP 165 Watt, Lamp Life Cycle is 2000 hours, in the economic mode, it is 3000 hours.

Lens Aperture is F/2.0-3.0, it has manual zoom, 2x zoom factor, Vertical Lens Shift is 10:5 – 5:10, Horizontal Lens Shift is 10:0 – 0:10, Analog video format options are NTSC, PAL, PAL-M, SECAM, PAL-N, NTSC 4.43. Analog video signal options are RGB, Component video, S-Video, Composite video. Digital Television Video Formats options are 480p, 480i, 575i, 720p, 575p, 1035i, 1080p, 1080i. Interfaces include RGB input – 15 pin HD D-Sub (HD-15), 2 x HDMI – 19 pin HDMI Type A, Composite video input – RCA, 2 x Component video input – RCA X 3, S-video input – 4 pin mini-DIN, Serial RS-232 – 8 pin mini-DIN. Sanyo gives a three year warranty for this product.

Design:

In terms of design, the Sanyo PLV-Z3000 is pretty basic and certainly won’t win any beauty awards. You shouldn’t be expecting too much bells and whistles on a projector at this price. Our review model was a black boring looking box. The video connection ports are all located on the rear, on one side there are vents for intake and outtake of air and on the other side, there are lens shift wheels.

Inside Dope:

Front projection products are growing fast in the market because the price is steadily coming down and hence it is pretty affordable. These days, a 1080p decent projecter is cheaper than a typical 60 inch plasma TV. Of course, you have to pay extra for the screen but it can be larger than the plasma TVs 60 inch screen. We are reviewing Sanyo PLV-Z3000, a 1080p projector here which is inexpensive, has good options for connectivity and offers good picture quality tuning options too. We wouldn’t recommended a screen larger than 92 inches for this projector as the image quality will suffer. But otherwise, the device offers good value for money.

Sanyo PLV-Z3000′s remote control has a smart design and it has backlight too. The layout is pretty good and we could operate it easily with one hand. There are buttons for picture controls, image modes and inputs. There are seven option pages on the onscreen menu and it is quite easy to navigate.

We liked the feature offerings of the Sanyo PLV-Z3000. In order to make installation easy, there are vertical and horizontal shift lens which helps you place the projector for image accuracy. There is no keystone correction on this projector and we are glad about that since it ruins the picture quality by introducing some unwanted artifacts and reducing the resolution.

Sanyo PLV-Z3000 gives you six picture modes to choose from – x.v.Color, Dynamic, Living, Natural, Pure Cinema, Creative Cinema and Brilliant Cinema. In our lab tests, we chose the Natural mode since the Cinema mode was a bit dim. There are five options for color temperature – High 1, 2, Low 1, 2 and Default. Here we used Low 2 since it was the closest to standard broadcast color temperature of D65. Once we finished calibrating the grayscale, the projector went to the User mode.

The Iris adjustments are located in the Advanced Menu. The Iris was kept fixed at -20 for balancing the blacks and light output. We would recommend turning off rest of the features in Advanced menu like Dynamic Gamma, Smooth Motion, Color Management, Transient Improvement, and Auto Black Sketch. There are not a lot of projectors out there which offer 120 Hz refresh rate but Sanyo PLV-Z3000 does have it. Also noteworthy is that this device doesn’t dejudder processing which 120 Hz panels are known to have. If you yearn for smooth videos, this is not the ideal projector for you. There is a ‘Smooth’ effect in the menu but we didn’t see any change in the video quality. We are not complainning here though, because we always switch if off.

Sanyo PLV-Z3000 has all the connection options that you’d need in such a projector. You get two HDMI ports, which is the most important set of ports. Along with that, you have VGA jack for PC connections, composite video input, S-Video input and component video inputs. The only thing lacking here is RS-232 interface.

With regards to performance, the Sanyo PLV-Z3000 is really good for the given price range. If you can afford to spend $600 more we will recommend you the Sony VPL-HW10 because it has better picture quality.

Our biggest gripe with the Sanyo PLV-Z3000 is that the secondary and primary colors look quite inaccurate, particularly green and red because the light output is lacking. We would recommend you to set the light output a bit to find a sweet spot. We used the 1.3 gain screen material and didn’t go larger than 92 inches diagonal (80 inches wide x 45 inches high). This resulted in high contrast and snappy picture. Color decoding on this projector was quite accurate for the Rec. 709 sources of HD. The primary colors are a bit way off particularly the green and red and the secondary colors don’t do too well either.