Projector Reviews

There is a reason why we say a display product's color temperature should be 6500 kelvins. There is a reason why we say color points are "off." There is a reason video has set parameters that define what it is supposed to look like. The reason is that people a lot smarter than us figured out what looks the best and wrote down what a display should do to look that way.

It is a great time to be a home theater enthusiast. Sure, the format war between rivals HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc has been distracting. But the price of 1080p projectors has fallen from the stratosphere to price levels many can actually afford. Prices of 1080p projectors are now below the $3,000 mark, and we're not talking stripped down bargain units or last year's closeouts either.

Sanyo has long been a big player in the business projector market. However, while it has a serious presence in home projectors in many markets, it has remained relatively low key for U.S. consumers. This is especially true when you compare it with manufacturers who are more aggressive at beating their own drums. But the PLV-Z3000 proves that the company knows its way around home theater projector design.

Description
The Sanyo lacks the Ferrari-like curves that many of its competitors sport. Still, its relatively plain, boxy shape is functional and well executed. All mechanical operations (horizontal and vertical lens shift, focus, and zoom) are manual. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since these are usually set-and-forget operations. The zoom lens has a throw-distance range of 9.8 to 20 feet for a 100-inch (diagonal) 16:9 screen.

It's easy to visualize the operation of a CRT projector: three tubes, each operating much as the picture tube in the TV on your kitchen counter, flashing overlapping red, green, and blue analog images onto the screen. If you have a good model in top operating condition, and if you or your installer have slaved over its setup, you'll see an incredible picture—one that, on a home-size screen (not so large as to accentuate a CRT's main limitation of light output), is still as good as home video gets.

Sharp practically put DLP front projection on the map as a high performance solution when it introduced its XV-Z9000 projector a few years ago. That projector featured the first generation "Mustang Chip," the first 16:9 native 720p DLP chipset from Texas Instruments. Sharp's SharpVision projector line has continued to evolve with TI's chips, with each new generation making incremental improvements over past models. We continue to be compelled to look at each iteration because Sharp's line has remained reasonably priced (between $11-$12k MSRP with "street prices" closer to $10k) and never given up much in pure performance even when compared to premium projectors costing much more.

Sharp has a long history in the home theater projector business. It began with a successful run of LCD models. But the company soon shifted its projectors to Texas Instruments’ DLP technology, which appeared to be ready to dominate the projection business for a time.

However, with the development of new and vastly improved LCD chips and designs in the recent past, all that has changed. LCD (and its second cousin, LCOS—a variation on liquid crystal technology) now dominates the projection market. Sharp is sticking to DLP, and its new XV-Z15000 is one of the first DLP designs to sport a new 0.65-inch digital micromirror device (DMD) from Texas Instruments. The DMD is the imaging chip at the heart of the DLP system.