Sharp XV-Z17000 Projector - Image Quality-4

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Art Feierman

Shadow Detail Performance

Excellent shadow detail, even on our favorite dark scene, the night train, in Casino Royale, the shrubs on the far side of the tracks on the right, are very detailed. The Z17000 does at least as good of a job as any home theater projector to come through here in probably at least six months.

The Sharp leaves nothing out, the best i can tell. And that's with a very well balanced gamma, measuring 2.18 (2.2 considered ideal), so it's not that the Sharp is artificially boosting up the dimmest objects found in the very dark ranges.

XV-Z17000 bond train large

8700ub bond train large

home-cinema-8350 space cowboys train-large

hc4000 bond train large

HC3800 bond train2

W6000 bond train large

VPL-HW15 bond train large

XV-Z15000 bond train large

Bottom line: The XV-Z17000 is rather excellent at revealing dark shadow details. Black level performance is that of an ultra-high contrast projector. There are 2D projectors up around the price of the Z17000 that can't match its blacks, but then there are others that can - especially, the JVC RS40, which likely beats it by a bit. Ultimately, the blacks are more than good enough, so that this projector really can perform rather well on very dark scenes.