Sanyo PLV-Z3000 Owners Thread

JasperandWalter

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As it arrived this morning I thought I'd better start one. First impressions - well the box is brown cardboard and very similar to the box my Z4 came in 3 years ago.:)
 
Hi Jasper,

Def looking forward to your impressions asap!!!

Btw, what price did you pay and who did you buy it from?

Thanks,

wasabi
 
So box opened - and it's bigger and blacker than the Z4. I'll post some pictures later.

I was going to do some comparison photos of the screen but my camera skills are clearly not upto it. What I can say is if you have a Z4, buy a Z3000. The whole image is so much blacker, clearer and brighter. Not very scientific, but for Friday night the best I can do.

Very happy.:thumbsup:
 
Found them. £1950 on hdmi. Bit too much for me. Bet they're good though.
 
Be plenty this time next year @ a better price, equal to the z2000 prices I bet:smashin:.
 
JasperandWalter,
So, you have had your Z3000 nearly a week now. What do you think?
I am trying to figure out whether the 'best' cinema mode (in eco brightness mode for 19db) will be bright enough for a 92" 0.9 gain white screen with a 3.4m throw. I think it will, because I primarily watch movies in complete darkness. For the odd sports game, I would be happy to put it in a brighter (less colour accurate) mode.
I am quite disapointed that it does not have separate gain and bias controls for calibration though.
I wish I could go see this thing with my own eyes somewhere.
cheers,
William
 
Most detailed review is here:
PLV-Z3000 Projector Review

I have a 2.4m wide 16:9 screen about 5m from the projector and it's plenty bright enough. I even have a log fire in the same room (alright log fires in a cinema may not be clever, but they are female friendly) and it's still bright enough.

I can only really compare with the old Z4 but so much better than that.
 
My Z3000 was waiting for my when I arrived home from work today. Going to get it on the ceiling tonight and make sure it all works. Quite a bit of re-cabling to do though...
 
Unfortunately, the LCD panel alignment/convergence is not very good on my unit. I have decided that I cannot live with the Z3000 that I got, so I am going to contact the merchant today to see if I can get it swapped. This is why I hate buying this sort of item off the net.
 
Now that I got some full HD test patterns, I can see that it is the green panel that is not aligned with the other two. Also, the blue and green panels aren't perfectly aligned either. Here are two PICs.
- HD convergence pattern - no explanation needed really
- the menu from Top Gun Blu-ray (US region free) - notice that all the white lines are red on the left adge and green on the right. Same for the yellow letters.
- not shown, but the built in test pattern shows convergence issues, but since the background is blue (why?), it makes it more difficult to see.

I contacted Ivojo, who I bought it from. (BTW, my unit was shipped direct from Sanyo UK, not from Ivojo.) Sanyo apparently need to look at some pictures of the convergence, so I had to send Ivojo some pictures (including those above) for them to pass on to Sanyo. That was about 5PM yesterday. I will find out on Monday if Sanyo are going to swap it out. If Sanyo don't swap it, I will be returning the projector. That would be a shame because I am pleased with it in all other respects. This throws my Christmas HD movie watching plans up in the air...

Also, my front room looks like a war zone because I have perched my bluray player and my xbox360 on a ladder underneath the Z3000 to have just direct 1.5 meter cables to the PJ in order to rule out any issues that could be introduced by my Onkyo 876 or 10M HDMI cable.
 

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Now that I got some full HD test patterns, I can see that it is the green panel that is not aligned with the other two. Also, the blue and green panels aren't perfectly aligned either. Here are two PICs.
- HD convergence pattern - no explanation needed really
- the menu from Top Gun Blu-ray (US region free) - notice that all the white lines are red on the left adge and green on the right. Same for the yellow letters.
- not shown, but the built in test pattern shows convergence issues, but since the background is blue (why?), it makes it more difficult to see.

I contacted Ivojo, who I bought it from. (BTW, my unit was shipped direct from Sanyo UK, not from Ivojo.) Sanyo apparently need to look at some pictures of the convergence, so I had to send Ivojo some pictures (including those above) for them to pass on to Sanyo. That was about 5PM yesterday. I will find out on Monday if Sanyo are going to swap it out. If Sanyo don't swap it, I will be returning the projector. That would be a shame because I am pleased with it in all other respects. This throws my Christmas HD movie watching plans up in the air...

Also, my front room looks like a war zone because I have perched my bluray player and my xbox360 on a ladder underneath the Z3000 to have just direct 1.5 meter cables to the PJ in order to rule out any issues that could be introduced by my Onkyo 876 or 10M HDMI cable.

This is a similar story on most lcd projector, and can also cause issues with sharpness, which is why I went with the hw10 (you can adjust the convergence);-). I hope you get the issue sorted.:)
 
This issue will get sorted. Sanyo started requesting photo's for image problems a while back after a first time purchaser got a bit aggressive with a Sanyo support technician about a blurry image on their brand new projector. Turned out they hadn't read the manual and didn't know you had to focus a projector....

Many first time users are not regular forum viewers and we've found are quite often (initially) a bit baffled by machines as complex as the Sanyo. Not being able to get a square image is the most common problem (usually with the added complication of lens shift) and we've found ourselves that quite often a picture speaks a thousand words when describing problems. Before the advent of affordable digital cameras and camera phones we quite often found ourselves in the tricky situation of getting a projector back in that the customer thought was faulty, only to find that we're unable to duplicate the "fault". In the case of "wonky image" syndrome we've even had a couple of customers with walls so out of square that the projectors got not chance.

Anyway, all this leaves us in a situation where we have to get authorisation before we can swap a machine out and getting a photo of the problem usually speeds this up nicely.
 
A bit of good news. Sanyo will be delivering me a replacement PJ tomorrow.

Having previously been a part-time ISF calibrator a number of years ago, I can fully appreciate why Sanyo would want to look at some pictures. So I was happy to take the pictures and send them in. (Although it is difficult to easily get the exposure correct so that the picture is representative.) Anyway, I was pleased with how Ivojo handled the situation. :smashin: Since Sanyo seems to ship direct to Ivojo's customers, it probably makes things a bit tricky for them to coordinate between the customer and the supplier. I was very worried that it would be a nightmare, but it wasn't.

Fingers crossed that the replacement does arrive tomorrow, has better convergence, and doesn't have other things wrong with it.

I'm looking forward to getting some hours on the bulb and dusting off my spectroradiometer for a full calibration.
 
This is a similar story on most lcd projector, and can also cause issues with sharpness, which is why I went with the hw10 (you can adjust the convergence);-). I hope you get the issue sorted.:)


Ive had 4 Sanyo LCDs now and not a single convergence problem on one of them.

Sanyo are a very good company for after sales.
 
Sanyo started requesting photo's for image problems a while back after a first time purchaser got a bit aggressive with a Sanyo support technician about a blurry image on their brand new projector. Turned out they hadn't read the manual and didn't know you had to focus a projector....

:rotfl: That is quite funny. But I have to comment on the documentation with the Z3000. (Mind you, I am anal about documentation as I write telecoms design docs for a living.) With the Z3000, there was only a printed Quick Start Guide in the box and there is no mention of Focus in it, apart from an arrow pointing to the focus ring. The 'full' manual is only provided on CD-ROM, but it leaves something to be desired. It does however contain this one line: 'Rotate the Focus Ring to focus the image.' :rolleyes:
 
A bit of good news. Sanyo will be delivering me a replacement PJ tomorrow.

Having previously been a part-time ISF calibrator a number of years ago, I can fully appreciate why Sanyo would want to look at some pictures. So I was happy to take the pictures and send them in. (Although it is difficult to easily get the exposure correct so that the picture is representative.) Anyway, I was pleased with how Ivojo handled the situation. :smashin: Since Sanyo seems to ship direct to Ivojo's customers, it probably makes things a bit tricky for them to coordinate between the customer and the supplier. I was very worried that it would be a nightmare, but it wasn't.

Fingers crossed that the replacement does arrive tomorrow, has better convergence, and doesn't have other things wrong with it.

I'm looking forward to getting some hours on the bulb and dusting off my spectroradiometer for a full calibration.

Glad you got it sorted:). Does seem sanyo's customer service has been good...

Hope you enjoy the projector.:)
 
Just a quick note to say that my replacement Z3000 arrived a few hours ago. The convergence on it is much better than the first one I got.

The new unit still has a slight blue halo all the way around bright/white objects, but not as much as the first PJ. In the 30 minutes of actual movie footage that I have watched on it so far, it has not been noticable from the seating position. I have adjusted or turned off everything that could be causing that, so I think it must just be a Sanyo Z3000 thing.

Does anybody else have this blue halo?

I may even watch a movie tonight if I can finish tidying up the room and wrapping presents...
 
Hi!

It seems no-one is using this mode? At least no-one is talking about it. Not here, not in any review. Why is that?

I just recieved my Z3000, and picture looks fantastic with that mode. I tried calibrating my Z3000 according to Sanyo PLV-Z3000 Projector Calibration advices, but I prefer how picture looks like in x.v.color-mode. It's just mode.. lively. Compared to this other modes look like you were watching the picture through thin fog screen.

I have Denon AVR-1909 that feeds Z3000. Denon is operating in YCbCr color space. I feed Denon with PC (Radeon set to output YCbCr 4:4:4) and PS3 (YCbCr + superwhite with movies, limited RGB with games).
 
Hi All,

Had my new toy running for a day or so now so thought I'd post up my settings and a wee piccie:

Pure Cinema Mode:
Red: 8
Green: 0
Blue: -1
Colour: +1
Tint: +1
Brightness: 0
Contrast: 0
Sharpness: +2

I got these from projectorreviews.com. I also had a bit of a play with the Dynamic mode, but ended up running with these in Pure Cinema. Attached is a wee piccie from our 67" screen, doesn't really do it justice from a photo (as you'd expect) but hey... :)

Cheers,
Mark.
 

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Damn it! I wished I hadn't read this thread, I want to upgrade my Z4 now!
 

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