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Sanyo PLV-Z4000 Post Calibration Grayscale1

Posted on October 18, 2013 By Art Feierman

As with most home theater projectors, if you want the most out of your PLV-Z4000, a calibration is necessary. You really have three options: Calibrate it yourself, with calibration discs like the DVE-HD or Avia, have a professional calibrate it, or you could drop in our settings, which may not be perfect for your PLV-Z4000 (as each projector is a little different, mostly due to lamp variation), but still a far sight better than the “out of the box” settings.

This PLV-Z4000 does not exhibit the fairly noticeable yellow green shift we couldn’t eliminate in the older Sanyo (yes it’s there in Dynamic mode, but more muted than last time, and that’s advantageous when you want max lumens). That, right there, makes this a better projector! And all the numbers indicate that this projector will provide a more accurate, better picture, than the older Z3000. That means the real question is not how much improvement, but how the Sanyo stacks up against other projectors.

The limited RGB settings (only one for each color) on the Z4000 primarily affect the middle ranges, and have less effect at the extremes (20 and 100 IRE). That is the same, it seems as the older Z3000, but Mike indicated that the Z4000 may have a little more affect on the ranges, than it’s predecessor, which would make sense considering the numbers above.

We did not use Dynamic Gamma in our calibration. It does have noticeable impact on grayscale balance as well as gamma. Integrating Dynamic Gamma in, makes for a far more time consuming calibration.

Since the measured (regular) gamma without using Dynamic Gamma was 2.17, and 2.2 is ideal, this is about as close to dead on, as you will get.

RGB Settings

These are the adjustments we made to Red, Green and Blue for the grayscale balance of the Pure Cinema mode, and should be fine for Creative Cinema as well, though not confirmed. The two modes measure slightly differently, but that may be attributable to their different default lamp modes.

Calibration settings:
We set up User 1 based on a Pure Cinema starting point, Contrast on 3, Brightness on 0, Color on –8, Tint on 1, Gamma on –1, Lamp on Normal, Iris on Fixed at –60 (You’ll want the iris opened and dynamic).

RGB settings (default is 0)
Red 4
Green -2
Blue -2

Lumens measured were a mere 234, but that’s with the iris at -60… Pure mode is theoretically for “purists” those who would not use a dynamic iris.

Resulting color temperature of white for Pure (or Creative) Cinema: 6571K (almost perfect).
These settings are virtually identical to our Z3000 settings, but the results sure are definitely different (better now).

For a quick calibrate of Living mode (which Mike saved in User 2):
Red 10
Green 0
Blue -5

Resulting color temperature of white: 7180K (defintely a little cool, but looks great, especially for sports).

Mike didn’t setup Dynamic mode, but these settings probably will do the trick:
Red 16
Green 0
Blue -2

You could drop the blue further, but assuming you don’t want to further add to the yellow-green, I’d say better to boost red, than drop blue any further. The resulting settings are probably in the low to mid 7000K range, not too much different than Living mode after Mike got done with it, (but more default color saturation – for cutting through the ambient light, of course).

That pretty much covers our settings. BTW, for Gamma, typically -1 or 0 work best in most modes – Mike didn’t provide specifics. For sport with ambient light you might try 0, +1, or maybe even +2, if that works in your situation.

Sanyo PLV-Z4000 Projector Calibration and Settings
Sanyo PLV-Z4000 – Projector Screens