The Sanyo PLV-Z 700 is a Full HD, LCD projector for the every man. Available since late 2008, Sanyo’s entry-level device currently sells for around 1,000 GBP online.

Florian Friedrich, tested on December 14, 2009

Great 24p movie picture.
Highly versatile (lens-shift and zoom).
Comprehensive video processing.
Fair price.

Mediocre brightness.
Low contrast.
Slight motion-blur.

An excellent projector that’s easy to use and comes at an extremely fair price! The crisp HDTV picture impresses, and clever control technology compensates for the device’s limited contrast. In brief: A superb projector for smaller rooms and smaller budgets!

Operation and Features

The remote control is small, handy, and easy to operate, and optionally glows in the dark.

Excellent: The Sanyo PLV-Z 700 stands out with motorized lens-protection and lens-shift — far from a matter of course in this price class! This model inherits the numerous picture-setup options and the iris control from the PLV-Z 2000 predecessor model. Sanyo’s newest technologies, such as 120-hertz video-processing, are not, however, present on the 700; such features remain the preserve of the manufacturer’s top model, the PLV-Z 3000. Installation is simplified enormously by practical features such as the 2x zoom and, above all, the wide-range lens-shift. You can shift the picture by up to one screen-width horizontally and by almost two screen-heights vertically — now that’s flexible!

Color and Light

The Sanyo PLV-Z 700’s color gamut is slightly extended, but the colors still look fairly natural. Grayscales vary slightly in tint.

We found the names of the presets confusing; the user manual (which comes only on CD-ROM) informs us that “Brilliant Cinema”, for example, is ideal for bright rooms; instead, the name sounds more appropriate to a dark home-theater. Actually, the setting is unsuitable for the home-theater, since it delivers imperfect black levels in dark environments.  On the other hand, “Creative Cinema” — also confusingly named — is intended for contrast-rich playback in the dark home-theater. The other presets — Natural, Living, Dynamic — all produce way-too-cool color temperatures (beyond the 10,000-Kelvin mark) and therefore fail to earn our recommendation.

Quietly and swiftly, the iris works to increase contrast by darkening the projection in relation to the picture’s current contents. In addition to this, two dynamic lamp modes and a dynamic gamma correction work to increase the subjective impression of contrast. That’s all good, but the pitch and volume of the cooling fans change in relation to the picture content — an effect that will quickly infuriate many users. The eco mode, without dynamic lamp adjustment, provides some relief, since the fans then only produce 21 decibels of operating noise. This brings a disadvantage, however: the picture’s brightness with a static iris drops to around 340 lumens.

Territory for experts with the relevant measuring devices: the color-management.

We loved the color-management on the Sanyo PLV-Z 700 — it’s a fantastic playground for users that love to tweak settings. You can adjust the primary and secondary colors individually, and the nine-band RGB gamma correction also deserves praise. The catch? There’s little you can achieve with either of these unless you have access to appropriate measurement devices.

Picture Quality of Standard Signals

The rear of the unit hosts two HDMI 1.3b connections, with support for Deep Color.

Even the analog video interfaces provide excellent picture quality on the big screen — this quality also results from the low picture-cropping (overscan) and the largely flicker-free de-interlacing of TV and movie pictures. One of our particularly critical test scenes, the pan across the beach in “Six Days Seven Nights”, displays excellently on the Sanyo. In bright scenes, the projector impresses with natural skin tones and balanced colors. Nevertheless, we recommend playing back DVDs via HDMI, since the pictures then show better optical focusing and suffer no overscan.

The iris and automatic lamp adjustment work flawlessly, leaving no irritating evidence of their intervention. Differentiation of dark shades is excellent, even in gloomy scenes, as we observed in “The Lord of the Rings”. This is an astonishing performance if you consider that the maximum in-picture contrast measures just 770:1. Unfortunately, however, you cannot pep up the picture in this way in every situation; particularly in the dark home theater, the Sanyo fails to achieve the plasticity and depth of pricier models.

The PLV-Z 700’s control panel sits on the top of the unit; some projectors place it on one side.

Picture Quality of HDTV Signals

High-definition HDTV test patterns played back at 1,920 x 1,080 pixels resolution confirm the sharp picture-impression. At the normal viewing distance, which measures twice the width of the screen, we found no color fringing whatsoever, even in the finest test patterns — truly impressive! The coarser LCD pixel raster is only visible on XXL screens; unlike its PLV-Z 3000 older brother, the test candidate doesn’t conceal this effect using microlenses.

The Sanyo is also ideally equipped for HDTV via satellite. The video-processing converts interlaced HDTV images into flicker-free, crisp movie pictures and also presents HDTV documentaries and sports broadcasts without bothersome stair-step effects. But there was one sore spot: Fast movements suffer significant blurring, although — to be fair — even much pricier projectors struggle in this regard.

With movies in 1080/24p, however, this shortcoming barely makes itself known. In the James Bond Blu-ray “Casino Royale”, for example, roulette wheels glide cleanly across the screen. In another tricky sequence — a nighttime shot of the Montenegrin countryside — many projectors show blur during the camera pan across the treetops. Here, however, the “Transient improvement” setting makes itself worthwhile: The scene displays perfectly on the Sanyo, and the dynamic gamma correction performs genuine miracles. Without this — and we tried it both ways — the picture’s dynamics plummet.

Ideal Settings

Image Mode: Creative cinema

Brightness: 0

Contrast: 2

Color: 2

Tint: 0

Gamma: 0

Color Temp.: Default

Overscan: 0

Lamp Mode: Auto 1

Iris Mode: Mode 2

* 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.