Sanyo PLV-Z2000 Write-Up

I will start with a couple of quick notes on my environment to give context to my comments. I have a dedicated theater that is 100% light controlled, as a result brightness is not as big a concern. I have a 106' Severtson fixed frame screen. My primary seating location is about 10.5' away from screen. I am using a HR10-250 (HDMI), Oppo DV-971H (DVI to HDMI) and Xbox 360 with HD-DVD (VGA). I also added an Onkyo TX-SR705 this weekend that is handling the HDMI switching. Once the Samsung UP-5000 comes out I will be adding it to system.
I have been using the Z4 almost exclusively for TV (both SD and HD), movies and gaming since Jan 2006. I calibrated it using a Spyder2 and HFCR to be as close to 6500K as possible. I used it in ceiling mode with low lamp setting for noise reasons.
I got the Z2000 on Friday night. It was super simple to swap it for Z4 as the ceiling mount points are identical. I pulled down the Z4 and had the Z2000 up and in its place in about 10-15 minutes. After tweaking the focus, zoom and lens shift I went to calibrating.
One initial note this projector is QUIET. I literally was worried the fan wasn’t working when I first turned it on. I had to look to see that the fans were actually spinning. This is in full lamp and ceiling mode. Even sitting below the Z2000 I still can’t hear it; this was not true of the Z4.
The one oddity I have found is that for both the HR10-250 and Oppo I have to set the HDMI to enhanced. Otherwise all my blacks are crushed; it was really obvious once calibrated as a character with a black suit on lost all detail. I am going to test without the Onkyo in the middle to see if it is causing the signal to be converted from RGB (16-235) to PC (0-255). I have read of the 875 and 905 doing this but not 705.
All of my calibrations were done with a starting point of Pure Cinema. I will start of by saying that Pure Cinema is excellent out the box as far as grayscale goes; I dialed it in even more but most will be happy with it as is. I started with Brightness down to -8 and Contrast up to +11. The color was almost perfect I bumped it to +1 but it was close, for tint I went to +4. With these initial ones done I did a check of 6500K tracking and it was very good. I first used the standard RGB controls to dial it in a bit more. Then I went into the Custom Gamma under the advanced menu. Using this I was able to get the 6500K+-50 across the line. My Spyder2 can't measure below 30-40 IRE well so I can't vouch for that. The Custom Gamma is a really nice feature for getting grayscale right.
I repeated the same using the 360 playing the Get Gray DVD again. I had some weirdness in the 40-50 IRE range with my Spyder2 but again I was able to dial it in quite well. 100 IRE was about 6650 but that was the worst. One other strangeness I had is regarding the VGA connection and screen placement. As with the Z4 before it I had to change total dots to almost minimum to reduce overscan and then shift the image to left almost to the max. One warning if you make too much adjustment on the VGA the screen will begin to fade and then disappear; something in the Z2000 processing breaks down, the manual even mentions this. It took me a couple of tries of switching the 360 from 720p to 1080p to get it to sync right so I could get 0% overscan. I would highly recommend checking your overscan if using 360 with VGA.
Now I will give some general comments on Z4 vs. Z2000. The first thing I watched was two episodes of CSI (original) and the tie in episode of Without a Trace. CSI has a special place in my HD heart as it was also the first HD show I watched on my Toshiba 65” RPTV 6.5 years ago. However I have spent the most time watching football in HD since I finished calibrating so my comments will not be as broad yet. Once I get to watch a HD-DVD in full 1080p I will add some further notes. The Z2000 is much better with 1080 content, this seems a given but I have seen some question this. I can see a noticeable difference in detail. Color reproduction is also better on this projector; I feel there is more pop without a loss of accuracy. I think the biggest difference I see is in contrast. Everything just seems to have more depth now (I am using fixed iris). I never noticed SDE with the Z4 and surely don’t on the Z2000, even at my close seating position. While watching CSI it was obviously better in all regards than it had been on the Z4, it was almost like watching it for first time again. I can’t wait to try out some more good content.
The one downside I will mention is bad content looks even worse. Poorly encoded HD and SD content looks worse on the Z2000, this is simply because you can see the imperfections even better. As the display gets better the source is all the more important.
If you want to know if the upgrade from the Z4 was worth it I would definitely say yes. I essentially paid the same price now for Z2000 as I did 2 years ago for Z4, boy am I glad I didn’t spring for 10K Ruby 2 years ago a nice 6K savings.