The Sanyo PLV-Z2000 is a Full HD, LCD projector, released in late 2007 and currently selling from around 1,400 GBP.

Florian Friedrich, tested on January 22, 2010

Loads of presets and picture controls.
Very quiet.
Versatile positioning, thanks to wide zoom and lens shift.

Could be brighter; could have more contrast.
Poor interlaced-PAL processing.

The Z2000 is one of Sanyo’s best projectors. But competition is tough in this sector — Full HD projectors are by no means rare these days, and some are now even available for less than 1,000 GBP. The Sanyo’s biggest selling points are its living-room-friendly optics and design, and the excellent “Pure cinema” preset. On the other hand, a bit more brightness and contrast wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Most important connections:

2x 2x  1x 1x

Features

A motorised plastic cover slides over the lens every time you switch the device off; this protects the optics against dust.

The PLV-Z2000’s casing is attractive and rounded, but unfortunately only available in white. This won’t matter all that much in the living room, but it might put off home-cinema users — a white box in a dark room will stick out like a sore thumb. Other typically Sanyo features include a full set of controls on the device itself, allowing the user to control the projector entirely without the supplied remote control.

Lens shift controls on the side of the unit allow you to shift the picture up to 100 percent up or down, and up to 50 percent left or right.

The connections keep to the essentials, but there are still two YUV inputs (one more than usual) and two version-1.3 HDMI inputs, which also accept “Deep Colour” signals.

Also worthy of mention is the power switch, which allows you to disconnect the projector fully from the mains supply, and therefore to save energy that would otherwise be wasted in standby mode.

The dynamic iris and dynamic lamp adjustment allow brightness and contrast optimisation, and both systems have been improved from those in earlier Sanyo models.

With two version-1.3 HDMI inputs, the connections panel provides plenty of modern connectivity, but the lack of a trigger connection will irritate home-cinema users.

Operation

The compact remote control’s layout is practical, and the buttons glow to aid operation in the home-cinema environment.

What’s stayed the same since earlier models is the extensive on-screen menu. Tech-fans will keep themselves amused for hours with the settings on offer here: The advanced menus include controls for colour calibration, RGB gamma, and RGB gain. At the same time, numerous presets provide users with natural-looking pictures, requiring almost no tweaking in the menus. Any adjustments you do make can be stored in one of seven memory locations.

Light and Colours

The Sanyo’s colour space is too large, failing to meet the SDTV and HDTV standards (ITU-601 and ITU-709), even after painstaking calibration.

If you’re looking for a bright projector with natural colours, you’ll most likely end up disappointed with the Sanyo PLV-Z2000. Although the projector can provide both things, it can’t do them both at the same time. In one preset, the image is very bright, but the colour temperature is too high, making the colours look cold and unnatural. With the colours outputting correctly, on the other hand, the image’s brightness drops to just 360 lumens — which is only enough to support a two-metre-wide image. The competing Mitsubishi HC 4900, for example, achieves almost double that brightness with optimised colours.

As a result of the extended colour space, test patterns show synthetic-looking primary colours — green in particular fails to match studio standards. With actual films, on the other hand, the Sanyo performs well: Even tricky colour mixes such as skin tones or pastel colours display convincingly. Slight turquoise colouration on the left side of the screen irritates the eye in test patterns, but this is actually barely visible in film pictures. You might notice it, on the other hand, in Blu-ray menu screens.

Picture Quality of Standard-Definition Signals

Any DVD player you use with the Sanyo should ideally offer decent de-interlacing and up-scaling, since PAL signals, especially interlaced ones, are one of the projector’s weaknesses. Line-flicker only appears in really tricky scenes, but jagged edges are common with 576i-format HDMI signals. When, for example, we see Brad Pitt sitting on a bed at the start of “The Mexican”, stair-step effects appear along his waist. Even animated films such as “Monsters, Inc.”, in which digital artefacts normally don’t look out of place, are no fun to watch if you input them in this format.

In collaboration with a DVD player of the likes of the Denon DVD 2930 or 3930, which can output the signal up-scaled to 1080i or 1080p, the Sanyo’s pictures look altogether different: The finest details display accurately; the overall look is always natural and often captivating. We especially enjoyed the night-time scene on a golf course in “The Legend of Bagger Vance”. While many projectors let parts of the picture disappear into a sea of black, the Sanyo differentiates even the darkest details well, such as individual stalks of the course’s grass.

Picture Quality of High-Definition Signals

The outer-space drama “Apollo 13” shows that not only the newest releases look amazing on Blu-ray. The Sanyo makes good use of the high-quality mastering, reproducing the detail-rich, colourful indoor shots at the start of the film just as well as it does the moon orbit and the view into the depths of space. The crisp, twinkling stars give an extremely vivid impression of the view the original astronauts must have experienced at this point. Although the Sanyo’s contrast is impressive here, it’s not quite as breathtaking as that of contemporary models such as the Panasonic PT-AE2000 or the Sony VW-60.

We played the film back at a frame rate of 24 hertz, but we also tried inputting the signal at 60 hertz, and the results were almost exactly the same. This puts the Sanyo in a very small group of projectors released at the time that could do decent “reverse pulldown”. This process reconstructs the 24 frames per second of the original film signal without introducing additional judder. We also did a test run with the excellently mastered Blu-ray “Troy”, in which the blazing sun, gleaming suits of armour, and night-time battles all display convincingly.

But there are some limitations: The picture cannot cover a very large area, and users must accept slightly weak contrast and a minimal screen-door effect. This is because the control circuitry on the transmissive LCD chip is opaque and therefore leaves a fine shadow grid in the image. Competing company Panasonic, for example, combats this by fitting microlenses onto each pixel; these disperse the light to fill in the gaps, eliminating the screen-door effect. On the down side, some viewers dislike the slight loss of sharpness that the lenses cause. In any case, you won’t even notice the grid effect if your viewing distance is at least double the picture’s height. Test patterns from “DVE High Definition” attest to the projector’s otherwise-excellent video processing and optics, which can conjure up even individual pixels on the screen with no significant convergence errors.

Effect of different picture modes

Ideal Settings

Image Mode: Pure cinema

Brightness: -1

Contrast: -5

Colour: 0

Tint: 0

Colour Temp.: User

Red: -5

Green: -11

Blue: -14

Sharpness: 0

Lamp Control: A1

Iris Mode: Fast

Transient Improvement: 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.