Sanyo PLV-30 LCD

The Sanyo PLV-30 is an LCD projector with 600 x 800 native resolution aimed squarely at the home cinema market. Its £1725 price tag just about brings the PLV-30 within the budget of those who take their home entertainment seriously.

While its small dimensions and metallic blue livery won't win any design awards, the PLV-30 is a functional piece of equipment. The mains lead plugs in on the right-hand side, all other connections are located on the rear panel, and the mode and menu buttons are situated on top.

Two adjustable feet at the front can be locked down by means of release catches on either side and finely adjusted by screwing them in or out. The focus and zoom are manually adjusted on the lens mount.

There are inputs for a 15pin D-SUB RGB PC video cable, S-Video, composite and component video signals, as well as two stereo audio inputs for connecting to AV equipment or your PC's sound card and an audio out socket.

Set up was simple enough, although we had a few minor problems producing an acceptable image from a PC source. The Multi-Scan system should sense the input signal and automatically adjust to provide the optimum display settings, but initially the Windows desktop was missing a narrow slice on the right-hand side.

As the display resolution was set to 1024 x 768, we changed it to the projector's native resolution of 800 x 600, but the problem persisted. The auto image adjust button on the remote failed to make any difference, but in the end reducing the vertical refresh rate from 72Hz to 60Hz did the trick.

The PLV-30 then behaved very well and produced a reasonably clear and stable image from the PC at all resolutions up to the maximum 1280 x 1,024. At a push you could use it as a data projector, but the image quality falls some way short of XGA-resolution LCD projectors costing twice the price.

We tested the PLV-30's potential for home cinema with both DVD and VHS video and were generally impressed with the results. On the default settings colours were very natural, although the pixel grid is very noticeable.

While this isn't generally intrusive, it does cause problems with large areas of colour and titles and would certainly rule out the PLV-30 for anyone who watches a lot of subtitled material.

The 120w lamp delivers 500 ANSI lumens and, while the projector is reasonably cool and quiet, to get the best from it you'll need to ensure a good blackout, realistic throw distances and invest in a good quality high-gain projection screen.

However, at a projection distance of six metres you can display an image more than three metres wide which, with wide screen as well as 4:3 format material, is big enough to provide a cinematic feel in a large living room.

The remote is functional, rather than flash, reflecting the fact that for home cinema the source device, rather than the projector, is likely to be the centre of operations. It has a power button source select button, auto image adjust, keystone, digital zoom and pan and menu selection controls. There's also picture and sound mute, volume buttons and a digital freeze button.

You can ceiling- or rear-mount the unit and, although there's no readout for the digital keystone correction (you can't always tell when it's off), it does at least remember the last setting.

It compares very favourably with similarly priced models like the Toshiba MT1 and Sony VPL-CS2 and would be a good choice as the basis for a home cinema system based on either a PC or domestic DVD or video equipment.

CONTACT: Wedgewood Computers
0800 018 9967
www.ohp-projectors.co.uk/sanyo.htm