Sanyo PLV-Z700 Home Theater Projector Review: General Performance - 4

PLV-Z700 Projector: Measurements and Calibration

With lamp at full power, Gamma at -3, Iris fixed, Brightness +4, Color +5, Tint 2, Contrast 0, and all other advanced settings off (these are the settings that generated 675 lumens:

Advanced Settings

That resulted in these measurements

Over all, that's a pretty good set of numbers post calibration with a range of only 174K from 30 IRE to 100 IRE.

Gamma, with these settings averaged 2.23, very close to the ideal 2.20.

A quick calibration was also done to Brilliant Color

A quick calibration was also performed on Dynamic

Bottom Line on calibration. The Z700 is a strange beast when it comes to controlling RGB. Virtually all projectors (including the PLV-Z60 and the PLV-Z2000) have separate R,G,B controls for Gain and Offset (or alternate names, but those are the most widely used (also brightness/contrast, black level/white level, etc.)

The PLV-Z700, however has only a single control called White balance, with separate R,G, and B. This makes calibrating the color temperature of this projector somewhat trickier than on other projectors. Nonetheless, we were able to get pretty good results. Sanyo is bringing out a guide to calibrating the Z700, which I believe is being written by well known reviewer Peter Putnam. It should be available soon.

Of at least equal importance, turning on features like the iris and lamp controls, the dynamic gamma, dynamic black, etc., all seem to impact the color temperature. Thus, as you play around, and find the combination of advanced features you prefer, you might take this approach: Use our settings above, to start, then after playing with the advanced features, and deciding on the ones you will be using, and then have the projector calibrated for your preferred settings.

That means likely at least two calibrations - one for your "best mode" and one for your "brightest mode" and of course you can keep our settings as well, as they are going to be brighter if you use lamp modes other than Normal.

I did some quick math - there are so many options, and virtually all of them affect the color temperature - and concluded that one could conceivably come up with more than 50 different combinations to calibrate. Of course, you only need a handful at the most.

Bottom line: A bit more difficult calibration to do than most projectors, and advanced controls affect the final results and color temperature. Nonetheless, at least for the modes we calibrated, we were able to end up with more than satisfactory results.

One last note, a personal preference. I found that the setting for color saturation of the Z700 that we recommend of +5 for Creative Cinema, slightly oversaturated the image when I used black level enhancement feature. As a result, I'll recommend a lower setting for Color Saturation, if you plan to use that feature, probably between -1 and +1.

PLV-Z700: Image Noise