|
The Short Form
|
| $1,799 ($1,995 list) / SANYOPROJECTORS.COM |
|
Snapshot
|
| The first sub-$2,000 1080p projector to hit the market shows a bit of cost cutting, but offers some surprising features and a good picture for the money |
|
Plus
|
| • Great price for a 1080p projector • Lens shift and anamorphic squeeze included • Good picture quality from high-def sources |
|
Minus
|
| • Black levels don’t impress • Not great with standard-def sources • No separate gain and bias controls for grayscale calibration |
|
Key Features
|
|
• 1080p resolution • 2x zoom lens • Accepts 1080p/24 input signals • Manual zoom, focus, and lens shift •Anamorphic mode for constant-height lenses • Automatic lens door • Inputs: 2 HDMI, VGA, 2 component video, S-video, composite video; DIN connector for service • 5 3⁄4 x 13 5⁄8 x 15 3⁄4 in, 16 1⁄2 lb |
To my disappointment, almost everyone who calls me for advice is interested in flat-panel TVs, not projectors. For projector buyers, my advice would be different: You need 1080p. Most people don’t understand that greater resolution only pays off if the video display is large enough. Below a certain screen size (it’s debated, but probably somewhere in the 50-inch range), you can’t see the difference between 1080p and 720p. Almost everyone who owns a projector, though, is using a screen measuring 6 feet or larger — and on such large screens, 1080p delivers a noticeably more detailed picture and a less-visible pixel structure.
That’s why I was so excited when Sanyo announced the PLV-Z700, the first 1080p projector to list for less than $2,000. Granted, at $1,995, it’s only a few dollars below that threshold, but real-world prices put the PLV-Z700 just a few hundred dollars above 720p models — the street price is $1,799.
Of course, Sanyo had to give up some goodies to get the price so low, but it’s remarkable how much the engineers left in. Most appealing to me were the lens-shift controls. These let you shift the image right, left, up, or down without loss of resolution, so you can mount the projector off-center from the screen without sacrificing picture quality.
The lens-shift and zoom controls are manual, which is fine because those adjustments don’t have to be perfect. But the focus is also manual. Projectors that have remote-controlled focus let you get up close to the screen so you can see the fine details when you’re focusing. Because of the PLV-Z700’s manual focus, I had to keep going back and forth between the screen and the projector when I was making adjustments — and while I did get the focus sharp enough to see pixel outlines, I’m not certain I ever got it perfect.
The PLV-Z700 has all the inputs you would need, including two HDMI jacks. The lamp cover is on the back, so you don’t have to take the projector down from a ceiling mount to change the bulb. An anamorphic squeeze mode lets you use the PLV-Z700 with a horizontal-stretch lens to produce 2.35:1 ultrawidescreen images. (Unfortunately, most such lenses cost more than this projector does.) Sanyo even included a motorized lens door that closes automatically when the projector’s not in use.
The backlit remote has a dedicated button for each input, which makes programming a universal remote easier. But it lacks separate on and off buttons, which makes programming a universal remote harder.
SETUP
Except for my having to walk back and forth between projector and screen to set the focus, basic setup for the PLV-Z700 was a snap. I just plopped it on a table, used the lens-shift and zoom controls to get the picture centered and sized, then fussed with the focus. Dedicated buttons on the remote for brightness, contrast, color, and other functions made basic calibration a nearly effortless 5-minute process.
But when it came time to calibrate the color- imetry, I was disappointed to find that the PLV-Z700 has only global controls for red, green, and blue level — not the separate gain and bias controls that most projectors have. Many of the projector’s other adjustments hide in an advanced menu that has to be activated separately from the basic menu. The advanced menu includes a few great features. One is luminance, hue, and gamma controls for each color, which let me adjust the color points to within a percent or two of perfection. Not that they really needed adjustment — they were close enough to the standard at the factory settings. Other useful stuff: three iris settings and an iris-range control.
 |
PERFORMANCE
The benefit of 1080p was apparent the instant the PLV-Z700 finished its first warm-up and began displaying scenes from the Blu-ray Disc version of the surfing documentary Step Into Liquid. Viewing my 6-foot-wide 16:9 screen from a mere 3 feet away, I couldn’t see the outlines of the pixels that made up the image. The picture looked smoother and more detailed than any I’ve seen from a projector listing for less than $2,999. In many shots, droplets of water in the waves were clearly visible.
The colors looked realistic and mostly accurate, even if they didn’t jump off the screen as they do with many more expensive projectors. The tan skin tones of the sun-cooked surfers seemed just right — and as a Southern Californian, I’m quite familiar with the appearance of this species. The deep blues and greens of the ocean looked vivid and inviting. When I switched to the Blu-ray version of The Fifth Element, I was delighted to see the movie’s exaggerated colors displayed cleanly, with subtle details that might otherwise be masked by pumped-up color showing through.
The PLV-Z700 uses LCD panels, which aren’t well known for delivering deep, dark blacks. But even compared with most of the $3,000 LCD projectors I’ve seen recently, the PLV-Z700’s picture looks slightly washed out. You can play around with the
iris and the lamp brightness setting to deepen the blacks, but this budget projector never manages to match its more elite brethren. Still, the dark parts of the picture look pretty good, even in the scenes from Step Into Liquid that feature brilliant whitecaps highlighting a dark ocean. They just never look great.
I did notice a couple of niggling little problems. The Sanyo projector’s picture uniformity was just okay, exhibiting a tilt toward red at the top and toward blue at the bottom. And even after I calibrated its picture, dark grays and blacks sometimes looked a little reddish. I can’t say that any of these flaws ever distracted me while I was watching regular DVDs and Blu-rays Discs, though. Also, standard-definition material upconverted by the projector looked soft — a problem you might be able to fix by setting your source components or your A/V receiver for high-def output.
BOTTOM LINE
There’s no doubt that Sanyo’s PLV-Z700 is a remarkable bargain. I’d prefer it to any inexpensive 720p projector, even those that might enjoy certain performance advantages. Given a choice, though, I’d rather spend an extra $1,000 and step up to a higher-end model that delivers deeper blacks. If you’re buying a projector, you should insist on 1080p — and the PLV-Z700 allows even budget-minded home theater enthusiasts to make that demand.
TEST BENCH
Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard
Color |
Target X |
Measured X |
Target Y |
Measured Y |
Red |
0.64 |
0.64 |
0.33 |
0.35 |
Green |
0.32 |
0.29 |
0.60 |
0.65 |
Blue |
0.15 |
0.15 |
0.06 |
0.05 |
The PLV-Z700 delivered the most accurate color reproduction with its Creative Cinema picture preset and Default color temperature mode selected. Grayscale tracking before calibration averaged 395° below the 6, 500-K standard from 30 to 100 IRE. That’s pretty good for a factory-fresh projector, but regardless, darker areas in the image showed a mild reddish-brown cast. The projector does not have separate gain and bias controls for red, green, and blue, just global level adjustments for each color. This arrangement made it impossible to raise the color temperature for only the lower IRE levels. Still, raising the overall color temperature a bit delivered a more pleasing picture.
Color decoder tests through the HDMI and component inputs revealed that red, green, and blue were all within 5% of spec. As compared with the SMPTE HD specification for digital TV colors, the set’s green and blue primary color points were mostly very close to ideal at the factory settings; adjustment of the Color Management controls brought most of the color points within 1% of SMPTE spec.
The PLV-Z700 offers three iris modes: Fixed (off), Mode 1 and Mode 2. Mode 2 delivers the deepest blacks, so that’s the one I used. It also offers three lamp levels; I used the lowest. Even with these modes activated, though, I couldn’t get the projector to deliver true deep black. With these settings, and with the iris set to Fixed, the native contrast ratio measured 375:1. With full-field 100 IRE and 0 IRE patterns and the iris in Mode 2, the contrast ratio of the calibrated projector measured 1,628:1.
Overscan measured 0% for 1080i/p-format high-definition signals with the overscan switched off; with overscan adjusted to maximum, it measured about 3%. A crosshatch pattern showed no significant convergence error.
The gamma settings are designated with numbers ranging from -7 to +7. I settled on -1 as the best overall. The adjustment steps are coarse, making fine-tuning impossible. Brightness uniformity was just okay. On black and dark gray fields, the picture shifted to red toward the top and blue toward the bottom. On brighter fields, this effect was less noticeable, and I didn’t notice it at all with normal program material.
The PLV-Z700 breezed through the tests on the HQV Benchmark Blu-ray disc — no great surprise, because the reviewer’s guide that accompanied the projector practically dared me to run them. The film and video resolution tests looked great, and it performed at least as well on the “jaggies” as any projector I’ve tested. I could find no noise reduction adjustment, but the projector does seem to have effective noise reduction processing. Test patterns showed substantial reduction of noise without much apparent effect on detail.
It’s obvious that 480i upconversion is one place where Sanyo cut corners to hit the price point. When in Auto mode, the projector’s trips up on the HQV DVD’s 2:3 pulldown (Film Detail) test, but works fine with regular movies. And the image from standard-def sources looks soft. But using high-def video sources or the video upconversion built into a good A/V receiver will eliminate this problem.