Sanyo PLV-Z4000

The basics

The Sanyo PLV-Z4000 is an HD home cinema projector with a display resolution of 1920 x 1080, maximum 120Hz refresh rate, 1200 lumens brightness and a contrast ratio of 65000:1. It features two HDMI and two component video inputs, weighs 7.5kg and measures 400 x 146 x 346mm.

The good

Setting up a home cinema projector can be a tad daunting, but Sanyo has taken some of the pain out of the process by fitting the PLV-Z4000 with a 2x optical zoom and vertical and horizontal lens shift, giving you a fair amount of flexibility when it comes to placement (in other words it can be slightly offset rather than placed directly facing the wall).

It’s no slouch on the performance front either, delivering an image with inky black levels (as long as you run it in a totally dark room), no overexposure in bright areas and, thanks to high quality noise reduction tech, an overall clean, unspeckled look.

The bad

It’s not all eye-strokingly gorgeous, mind you. The built-in upscaling tech isn’t the best, leaving standard def pictures a tad soft, and the motion processing system doesn’t deliver the judder-free smoothness of some rival projectors. The brightness, meanwhile, is fine if you’re always watching in a blacked out room, but lacks the power to deliver decent pictures when there’s ambient light about, especially when the PLV-Z4000 is in eco mode (which both saves power and delivers those great black levels we mentioned above).

The bottom line

While the Sanyo PLV-Z4000 is fine for those with a dedicated, blacked out home cinema room, more casual film fans may want to look elsewhere.