The Sanyo PLV-Z 3000 is a Full HD, LCD projector. On the market since early 2009, Sanyo’s flagship home-theater model offers deep blacks and attractive contrast and is available online for around 1,650 GBP.

Florian Friedrich, tested on December 16, 2009

Versatile positioning.
Plenty of useful picture controls.
High contrast.
Barely any judder in movie playback (at 24 and 60 Hz).

Inaccurate colors in the factory setup.
Not particularly bright.
Average de-interlacing of standard TV.

This projector is a bit like a rough diamond: Only when you give it the necessary polish does it begin to shine, producing a contrast-rich movie picture with authentic colors; the factory setup is barely suitable for home-theater, and requires extensive tuning. The low light-output cannot, however, be corrected in the same way. This shortcoming means — sadly — that we can only recommend the Sanyo for pictures up to two-meters wide.

Operation and Features

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty, let’s have a quick look at the new Sanyo’s design: Unlike its white predecessor, it looks very elegant, and the anthracite-colored casing also suits the dark home-theater much better. We’re glad to see that the Sanyo developers have hung on to the excellent, motorized lens cover, since, on the predecessor model, this turned out to provide extremely effective protection against dirt and damage. We’re also taken with the manual optics adjustment, which allows versatile positioning — the 2x zoom range, for example, is massive. There’s also a lens-shift, which allows you to shift the picture by one screen-width to the left or right, and by one screen-height up or down.

Excellent: You can also control the Sanyo without the remote control.

The tidy-looking menu also makes a top impression. The controls and buttons on the projector allow easy operation, even without the remote control — if, for example, you can’t be bothered to dig it out of the crack in the sofa just yet. Not quite as practical was the remote-control sensor’s position on the front of the projector — those mounting the projector in front of the viewing position will therefore have to aim the remote carefully so that the screen reflects the signal back to the sensor.

The remote control’s backlighting and many direct-access buttons provide everything the home-theater fan could wish for.

On the plus side, the numerous picture controls give tweak-happy fans that plenty to play with — if you want, you can spend hours adjusting the color temperature, color-balance, gamma, and secondary colors. The user can edit the presets and save them in one of seven user memory-locations. This also therefore allows a before–after comparison, since the original parameters are retained.

We noticed a logic error, however, in the “Zoom” picture-format setting: If you input standard TV material, “Zoom” corresponds to the “Anamorphic” picture format, which can only be activated for HD signals; with HDTV, on the other hand, “Zoom” corresponds to the classic letterbox-zoom — which is missing for standard signals.

Color and Light

In terms of the subjective picture impression, the Sanyo displays superb colors, but the first glance is deceptive: The highly pure primary colors have little in common with the standards used by movie studios.

It was clear from the start that the PLV-Z 3000’s lamp, which outputs just 165 watts, wouldn’t be working any miracles. In the eco mode, the projector’s output is only enough for a 1.7-meter-wide image with normal movie-theater brightness. There is one advantage to this, however: The relatively low heat production means that the cooling fans run very quietly — in eco mode, the Sanyo produces operating noise of a barely audible 24 decibels. But even at full output power, we noticed almost no noise; the test candidate never runs louder than 30 decibels.

Unfortunately — and, here, the PLV-Z 3000 does the same as its predecessor — no single preset delivers accurate colors at optimum light output. We noticed the same phenomenon on an LG projector, the LG AF 115. Still, a bit of fine-tuning will kiss this shortcoming goodbye — actually, you just need to set the color temperature to “Low1”, since this produces images with around the correct value: 6,500 Kelvin. The green tint that this adjustment produces will disappear if you also reduce the green control by five percent.

The extended color gamut also falls short of optimal, and fails to meet the international production standards for SDTV and HDTV. The color-management cannot help here; even with the help of precise test signals and a spectroradiometer, we failed to find a perfect balance.

Picture Quality of Standard Signals

Standard-definition 576i signals arriving digitally, sadly, fail to display perfectly on the Sanyo. While, on first glance, the picture has no overscan and is excellently sharp, closer inspection reveals a slight, but irritating, over-sharpening effect that cannot be deactivated. This makes edges look rough in movie images. Line-flicker also posed a problem — for example, in our beloved test scene from the DVD “Six Days Seven Nights”, in which the camera pans across a beach.

On the other hand, signals that originated as interlaced material — TV-camera recordings, for example — display excellently on the Sanyo: Pictures from a set-top box via an HDMI output appear flicker-free and with excellent differentiation of fine details. For the best home-theater enjoyment with DVDs, therefore, we recommend you choose a player that’ll output 1080i signals in top quality; compared to the results from 576i input signals, the PLV-Z 3000 produces significantly more detail from 1080i.

Picture Quality of HDTV Signals

Once you’ve fine-tuned the Sanyo (see Ideal settings), its picture stirs genuine movie atmosphere. With very little effort, you can also trim the excessive primary colors down to standard levels by reducing the color saturation. In comparison with our color-reference projector, the Samsung SP-A 800 B, the Sanyo has nothing to be ashamed of — skin tones come across excellently, as do greens and blues. In black-and-white movies such as “Casablanca”, the totally color-neutral grayscales are particularly impressive — once, that is, you’ve reduced the level of green.

Fun for fine-tuning fans: You can move the cursor across the image and adjust up to eight color shades in terms of saturation, tint, and brightness.

The Sanyo’s contrast ratio is high for an LCD projector, earning the device more plus points — dark scenes remain free of dishwater blacks. Even without dynamic lamp-, iris-, and gamma-adjustment, the picture looks rich, and there’s no sign of stepped shading or other nasty side-effects. The two modes “Creative Cinema” and “Brilliant Cinema” use techniques to produce an even richer black, but this only very slightly increases the contrast, since they simultaneously reduce the brightness of bright spots in dark images. Furthermore, we love the color-neutrality of the residual illumination — many other LCD projectors shine disappointingly blue. The Sanyo’s neutrality makes dark scenes in particular look deeper and more convincing.

But, like many of its LCD colleagues, the PLV-Z 3000 shows slight blur on fast-moving objects. The “Smooth Motion” technology, which can be set to various levels, provides some relief; for example, this aims to keep edges sharp in scrolling texts, without introducing flicker or sacrificing brightness. Although the Sanyo cannot match the motion clarity of the Sony VPL VW 80 or the Panasonic PT-AE 3000, the technology supports all signal types; it works best for 60-hertz HDTV documentaries, such as “Antarctica Dreaming”. We love the “5:5 pull down” setting, whose “Auto” mode aims to give judder-free, accurate 24p playback. This even works with 60-hertz frame rates, something few projectors can manage — congratulations!

So much praise just has to be followed by a ‘but’: Our test candidate showed colored shading that we couldn’t remove. On the left, we saw a slight pink discoloration; on the right, a subtle cyan discoloration. Apart from these, however, there’s no cause for complaint in terms of playback quality — the finest of checkerboard patterns appear on the screen with a slight loss of contrast and some discoloration, but are still clearly recognizable. Blu-rays, in general, look crisp and detail-rich.

The PLV-Z 3000’s Movie Modes

The Sanyo has seven presets, three of which aren’t suitable for the home-theater: “Living”, “Natural”, and “x.v.Color”. The last produces too much line-flicker for the home theater, as well as badly adjusted brightness levels. The first two, on the other hand, are way too green-tinted and bright. The “Natural” mode looks best to us, but we also had to make some adjustments here (see Ideal settings, below).

In the “Brilliant Cinema” and “Creative Cinema” modes, small white areas on black backgrounds shine much less brightly than do full-screen bright images. This, we’ve observed, has to do with the automatic lamp and iris adjustment, which turn down the light output in dark scenes in order to produce as dark a black as possible. The “Natural” mode, on the other hand, does without such tricks, but still delivers powerful results and deep black. When the colors are optimized, the small white box in a contrast test-pattern shines 2,700-times brighter than the black surrounding it — a remarkable performance for an LCD projector.

Ideal Settings

Image Mode: Natural

Brightness: 0

Contrast: 0

Tint: 0

Color Temp.: Low1

Sharpness: 0

Lamp Control: Normal

Gamma: -1

Iris Mode: Fixed

Iris Range: 0

Color: -6

Overscan: 0

Green: -5

5:5 Pull Down: Auto

Auto Black Stretch: Off

Contrast Enhancement: Off

Transient Improvement: Low

Color Management: Set all controls to middle setting

Smooth Motion: Off

Noise Reduction: Off

* These settings apply to realistic playback of HDTV/Blu-ray material through the HDMI interface in a darkened environment. Manufacturing and HDMI playback device deviations might necessitate slight adjustment.