Sanyo PLV-Z700 Home Theater Projector Review: General Performance

Posted on October 8, 2008 by Art Feierman

Use the anchor links below to find a specific topic, or simply scroll down the page. There's a great deal to cover in this section and these links will help you jump around.

PLV-Z700 User Memory Settings

The Sanyo Z700 has five user savable settings. I recommend you use these, as switching back and forth causes the regular presets, like Creative Cinema to reset to default settings. You want to create the variations you will be using and store them into these memories. You can calibrate yourself, hire a professional, or drop in the settings we list below, from our calibration.

PLV-Z700 Projector: Remote Control

The Sanyo PLV-Z700 projector remote control.

Overall, the Sanyo PLV-Z700 has a great remote. The backlight is a bright reddish-pink (pure red backlights are hard to read, this has more white component, and is easy to read).

Power, Menu, and the keypad are all up near the top. Down the left side below the Screen button (aspect ratio), are all the direct input buttons.

Going down the center and the right sides, first come the Preset, and User savable memory access buttons. Then are a host of direct access buttons: Brightness, Contrast, Color Temp, and Sharpness. Down at the bottom right, are more controls, including No Show (blank screen), Lamp control, and image Freeze.

PLV-Z700: Lens Throw and Lens Shift

The Sanyo PLV-Z700 has a 2:1 manual zoom lens that allows the projector to sit as close as 9.8 feet from a 100" diagonal 16:9 screen, or as far back as 20 feet (measured from the front of the lens). From these numbers you can figure out the range for any screen size. For example, if your screen is 10% larger - 110" diagonal, then add 10% to those distances.

The PLV-Z700 has extensive vertical and horizontal lens shift range as well.

You can move the image up or down as needed. If you are not using horizontal lens shift (most don't), there's enough range in the vertical lens shift to move the image up or down 1.5 screen heights from the center position.

For that 100" screen, that means you can mount the projector as high as about 24.5 inches above the top of your screen surface, or place the projector as low as 24.5 inches below the bottom of the screen's surface, or anywhere in between. That's about as much lens shift as you will find on any home theater projector. If you do need to use some horizontal lens shift, it will limit somewhat, the amount of vertical lens shift available.

The PLV-Z700 has support for an anamorphic lens! Of course, an anamorphic lens and sled runs about twice what the projector does, so it is unlikely that many will consider that option.

The combination of wide range zoom, and lots of lens shift, make the Sanyo PLV-Z60 equally flexible, whether shelf mounting, sitting on a table top, or ceiling mounted.