Panasonic Sanyo PLV-Z3000 Projector Calibration and Settings
We calibrate each home theater that is reviewed. It is a pretty standard calibration, there's always more that can be done by some of the "hi-end" calibrators.
12/07/2008 - Art Feierman
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Sanyo PLV-Z3000 Color Temperature
First, here is a repeat of the color temperture measurements for the Pure Cinema mode, right out of the box
30 IRE (dark gray): 7181K
50 IRE (medium gray): 7617K
80 IRE (light gray): 7244K
100 IRE (white): 6952K
Not terrible, but also, not impressive, as we are looking for all of those gray levels to be at 6500K.
Sanyo PLV-Z3000 Basic Settings
In addition to calibrating Red Green and Blue for a correct grayscale balance (6500K), there are a number of other settings that come into play. Typically Contrast and Brightness (white balance and black balance), need to be done first. Color saturation and gamma also need adjustment.
Our final settings (numbers in parens are the default numbers):
Contrast: Pure Cinema = 0 (0), Dynamic = -5, Living = -3
Brightness: Pure Cinema = 4 (0), Dynamic, PC = 1, Living = 3
Gamma
Lamp Mode: A1 (unless noted otherwise)
Dynamic Iris: On
Color Saturation: 1 (0)
Tint: 1 (0)
Zoom at mid-range,
All other settings at default
Important note: if you are working from any of the Presets, changes you make, are lost, and defaults return, when you leave that preset (ie. Pure Cinema), and return to it from another mode. That makes it important to save your preferred changes in one of the seven user savable modes.
Sanyo PLV-Z3000 Post Calibration Grayscale
The PLV-Z3000 produced good post calibration results, with a resulting good picture, but this Sanyo does not calibrate particularly well, and most other projectors can produce output consistently closer to the ideal 6500K. That said, the picture color is very good, and very watchable. Here are the measurements after calibration, for Pure Cinema Mode:
White (100 IRE): 6449K
Light gray (80 IRE): 6434K
Medium gray (50 IRE): 6752K
Dark gray (30 IRE): 6334K
To get the most out of the PLV-Z3000 a calibration is necessary. You really have three options: Calibrate it yourself, with calibration discs like the DVE-HD or Avia, have a professional calibrate it, or you could drop in our settings, which may not be perfect for your PLV-Z3000 (as each projector is a little different, mostly due to lamp variation), but still a far sight better than the out of the box settings.
We were never able to completely eliminate a slight shift to yellow/green, doing our usual basic calibration. This shift is likely due to the tendency of 3LCD projectors to have "oversaturated" greens.
The Sanyo does have a Color Management feature, in the Advanced Menu, that should allow a calibrator that goes further than we do with our basic calibration, to deal with the yellow/green push.
The limited RGB settings (only one for each color) on the Z3000 primarily affect the middle ranges, and have less effect at the extremes (20 and 100 IRE). Why the Z3000, like the PLV-Z7000, lacks the usual separate R,G,B controls for gain and offset, is perplexing (the low cost 720p PLV-Z60 has them).
We did not use Dynamic Gamma in our calibration. It does have noticeable impact on grayscale balance as well as gamma. Integrating Dynamic Gamma in, makes for a far more time consuming calibration.
Since the measured gamma without using Dynamic Gamma was 2.17, and 2.2 is ideal, this is about as close to dead on, as you will get.
RGB Settings
These are the adjustments we made to Red, Green and Blue for the grayscale balance of the Pure Cinema mode, and should be fine for Creative Cinema as well:
Red: 8
Green: 0
Blue: -1
For a quick calibrate of Brilliant Color:
Red: 9
Green: 0
Blue: -5
Resulting color temperature of white: 7129K (a little cool - blue)
For a quick calibrate of Dynamic:
Red: 10
Green: 0
Blue: -4
Resulting color temperature of white: 7983K - a significant shift to blue, but still really very watchable for sports. I like many, prefer a cool shift for sports viewing, to a warm one. The PLV-Z3000 with these settings looks great watching football on HDTV!
