Sanyo PLV-Z2000 Home Theater Projector Review - General Performance-6

For those wanting larger screens that 110", you are going to definitely go with some really high gain screens, say 1.8 or higher, which will limit your viewing cone (where you can sit for a good image).

PLV-Z2000 Projector Measurements and Calibration

The Sanyo actually was pretty good out of the box, in Pure Cinema mode. Ideally we want D65 - 6500K color temperature for movie watching.

The color temperature varied a lot from white (100 IRE) of 7036K a bit cool, but the middle ranges from light gray to medium gray were dead on, while dark grays had a slight shift to red (that' should read extremely slight, essentially unnoticeable:

For the other modes, as is usual, I made no attempt to fully calibrate the grayscale. Here are the white temperatures, for each:

Creative Cinema: Rather too cool, 7673K, but changing color temp, to Low 2, worked wonders, and resulted in 100 IRE of a near perfect 6548K. Dropping green to -7 solved an overly strong green problem in this mode.

Brilliant Cinema: Set also to Low 2, resulted in 7152K, and green needed some work here as well.

Natural: White measures 9420K, way too cool for good viewing of TV, etc., dropping the Color Temp, once again, to Low 2, really helps, with a very respectable color temp of 8249. Still slightly high for good TV, HDTV, it looked pretty good.

Living Room: This setting demands Low 1, for best grayscale, which reduces the color temp, from a default 8896K, to an excellent 7695K!

Dynamic: Hmm! A surreal 11,178K temperature for white, and even Low 2, only reduced that to 10196K, this mode, for optimum performance will need further adjustment, using lower level controls. Still, it is a typical Dynamic type mode, where accuracy is sacrificed for the horsepower and dynamics to cut through ambient light.

Vivid: Ugh! 11674K. And so far from anything realistic that I couldn't watch it without performing major surgery on the settings. Life is too short. Way too much blue and green. Way, way too much.

PLV-Z2000 Image Noise

Very nice. I ran the usual HQV HD test disk, and the PLV-Z2000 performed well on every test. For all my viewing of DVD/hi-def DVD, I used my Sony PS3. I tested at both 1080i input from the Sony, and 1080p. Both produced excellent results. I briefly tried 480p upscaled from my old Oppo DVD player (971), on the standard HQV disc, and that too was good. I did not try 480i - which is the only output available on older cheaper DVD players.

Let me put it this way. If you have a DVD player that can't even output 480p, find another room for it! Go spurge $50-$100 for a higher quality newer set, and many of those are upscaling DVD players. You just can't expect great results with your $2000+ projector from a 3 or 5 year old DVD player, who's performance level today, is worth about $24.95.

We're all done here. Your next stop is a couple of brief paragraphs about warranty, and then, from there, to the Summary page, where we'll talk more about strengths and weaknesses, and competitive issues, and summary with The Bottom Line.