Sharp XV-Z30000 3D DLP - Page 6

Ok, I was just wondering about the high gain screens employed by so many people for HT use. I accidentally got one of those because it was labelled as matte and gain 1 and it certainly was not.

I've spent some more time evaluating the Sharp and wanted to update the thread on my findings. At this point I think it is a keeper, especially at the Groupon price. Here is a little information on my background:

• I don't have a lot of experience with 1080p projectors in my theater room, in fact I'm upgrading from a Sharp XV-Z3000 (a 720p / 768p model). That unit was bought as a stop-gap many years ago while I waited for LED or Laser projectors to get to a reasonable price point. But now that I have a new theater room and the Sharp 3K just won't cut it on the screen sizes I'm looking at (12' - 14' wide) it needs to be replaced. It looks like I'll have to keep waiting on the LED / Laser dream.
• I have seen a lot of 1080p projectors in friends’ houses, dealer shops, and of course in the cinema. Most recently I checked out some Sony models at a local dealer, they had the 4K model and a 2K model. Looking back I don't recall if the lower end one was the HW30 or HW50, but I recall not being too impressed with it so it was probably the HW30. The 4K model looked great, though.
• I haven't seen the last 2 or 3 generations of the JVC models, but I was never interested in the ones I saw before that. At the time it seemed like you gave up a lot (in sharpness and detail among other things) to get an incremental improvement in black level. The most recent one I saw was a HD250 installed in a friend of a friend's room and it looked pretty bad, but I think it wasn't properly installed. It was either very soft or terribly out of focus, and I didn't want to say anything at the time as we were there to demo subwoofers, not mess around with the PJ.
• I'm a huge fan of 3D but have very little experience watching it at home. Going back as far as 2005 with Chicken Little I have always watched the 3D version of a film if it was available in the theater. But for the home market I've only really played with various flat-panels at the big box stores and then a demo of I think the first generation JVC model that supported 3D. The last 3D capable device I had in the home was the Sony OLED VR style headset, but I sent it back soon after purchasing due to the discomfort wearing it.

Now with that said hopefully everyone can either understand my point of view, or ignore it given my background and experience. What I've done since my last post was to setup the room so that the Sharp 30K is projecting a 12' wide image, where the center of it hits the screen I have on rental which is only 6' wide. That way I could get a better idea of the blacks and such that I can expect when running in my real theater a few months from now. At a high level this is what I thought:

• The Sharp 30K seems plenty bright enough for me on this size of screen. I've pretty much confirmed that the rental screen is 1x gain, because I put some samples of 1x gain fabric on top of it and noticed no difference in brightness. I was running in the lowest brightness mode (high contrast with eco mode on) and things were popping off the screen, in fact it was much brighter than what I was used to with the Sharp 3K on my old 9' wide screen.
• The 3D is amazing, and much better than in the cinema. I saw no ghosting (which I have seen easily and readily on all other consumer LCD and LCOS 3D sets up till now), the detail was incredible, colors appeared to be spot on, motion was great (but this has never been a big issue for me on other DLP sets), and brightness wasn't a factor for me even on a 12' 1x gain screen in movie 1 mode (3D). Just for fun I put the PJ into Stage (3D) mode, and as was said on projectorreviews.com this seemed very accurate for a "bright" mode. It got almost too bright (for me) but still the colors seemed natural and there was no ghosting or other noticeable issues. With a high gain screen I think it would be too bright.
• The blacks and overall contrast worked for me. During the fade to black scenes it would take my eyes a few seconds to adjust before I could distinguish the black of the screen against the black of the room. In all other scenes the blacks seemed black. However my standards in this area are not as high as some, so your mileage may vary.
• As I mentioned before, everything else in 2D was amazing. The picture was uniformly in focus corner to corner, details were sharp and spot on, and the motion resolution is the best I have ever seen in a projector. I've always known that Sharp did better on the DLP side with this as their units always had much less posterization when compared to competitors. But this is the best I have seen from them, when you quickly scroll through menu items (like in Windows Media Center) the text is still readable with just a small hint of blurriness. The only thing I've seen that is better was the OLED headset I had for a while.

Well, I think that covers it. For those that ordered this from Groupon I think it is a definite bargain and well worth the price. It seems to cover all the bases, with solid and impressive 2D plus spectacular 3D. I haven't tried it for gaming yet, but given my past experience with my old Sharp I don't anticipate any problems there.

renstimoy, wgat did you think of the motorized zoom and focus?

I like it a lot, but I don't have a good frame of reference since this is the first PJ I've owned with motorized lens features. Without that background I'm not sure how to compare them to good or bad motorized lenses. However I'm so glad it has them, because in my new room I will have the PJ in an equipment closet shooting through a hole in the wall. Let me say I was not looking forward to installing a PJ that had manual lens controls in that room! I was trying to figure out how I would focus and zoom without running back and forth a million times.

The controls on the Sharp are super precise. If you click just once it makes the smallest, almost imperceptible change to the focus / zoom. I never felt like the zoom or focus made it impossible to get just the right setting. And of course if you hold it down it moves really fast.

I received the Sharp XV-30K this past Friday. FWIW, I have owned many projectors, to numerous to mention. My primary viewing projector is currently a JVC RS4810. My intention in demoing the Sharp was to find out if it was suitable as a 3D projector that was better quality than the BenQ W7000.

After running a Lumagen auto-calibrate on it; these are my brief impressions:

Brightness - I have no measurements. Anecdotally, I watch in a makeshift basement theater where only the front wall is blacked out. I am projecting on to a 16X9 128" diagonal Seymour Centerstage XD; the room is light controlled, however the walls are off-white. Both the 2D and 3D had sufficient brightness to be pleasing to my eye. My recollection is that the W7000 is brighter, however.

Rainbows (I am very sensitive). Almost none. Best DLP I have ever seen in this regard. However, I did feel some eye strain after viewing 2D for a long period of time. It should be noted I have always had this problem with DLP technology.

3D - The 3D is outstanding; at least as good as the W7000, perhaps better. (It has been a while since I owned the w7000). The image is ghost and flicker free, and pleasing to the eye. It was rainbow free as well. A very nice easy image to watch image.

2D - The blacks and over all image do not come up to the level of the JVC; however the 2D did remind me of the Sony HW30. There is a hint of image noise that is not present in the JVC; perhaps I am spoiled by e-shift.

Build quality - this is built so much better than the BenQ. Quality is not even close. Motorized focus, lens shift, and zoom work well. Overall, this is a much better buy at 2K than the BenQ; the only caveat would be replacement lamp cost.

I have grown accustomed to the the added quality of e-shift. If that were not the case. I would consider keeping this as a single projector solution until the next generation of 4K projectors. As it stands now I may keep it as my 3D projector because its throw distance is quite similar to the JVC and works well in my setup.

As always, YMMV.

Thank you for your thoughts. I've been trying to steer people towards this projector for a while. But it's only been until recently where it's price has fallen enough to be competitive. Can you comment on apparent sharpness while viewing content. How would you rate how sharp it looks compared to your JVC? I had the chance to A/B a Mitsubishi HC7800D and a JVC DLA-X3 side by side and the JVC actually looked sharper on almost all material. My unit had particularly good convergence and what seemed to be a good lens sample. I've read the Sharp looks about as sharp as that Mitsubishi model.

Willie, thanks for your review. May I ask you to test whether Sharp really does 3:2 pulldown on 24p content?
http://www.hometheater.com/content/sharp-xv-z30000-3d-dlp-video-projector

thx for the info. I've mainly been curious about the light output in 3D mode. If you want to add a good light meter to the calibration equipment, this inexpensive meter works as good as my $200 meter.

http://www.amazon.com/DrMeter-Digital-Illuminance-Light-LX1330B/dp/B005A0ETXY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361197876&sr=8-1&keywords=light+meter

Couldn't resist; ordered the light meter. Amazon Prime is your friend. I will measure on Wednesday.

Willie

Can you play back a 3D ISO? I have a demo disk that has the 100 IRE patterns that runs in full frame packed mode for measuring the 3D lumens.

Yup. PM me.

I'm still amazed at the quality of motion on this Sharp. It could be unique to this unit, but maybe it is just the general industry trend. I have been out of the higher-end DLP market for a few years and so haven't really tested any recent models in earnest for this. Instead I've been mostly playing around with the budget 720p LED unit units over the last couple years looking for something to tide me over. All of these had much worse posterization than my old Sharp 3K and thus a lot less detail in motion. For that reason I assumed no progress was being made.

Over the weekend I pulled out my torture scene for this effect, which is from Batman Begins where an out of focus Bruce Wayne walks across the field of view while the camera is panning to the right. On all previous DLP units I had seen this would result in at least some degree of clay-face syndrome, some better and others worse. On the Sharp 30K I didn't detect any posterization at all, when my eyes tracked Bruce Wayne as he crosses the frame I didn't see any artifacts. Maybe this is a testament to the Sharp, or maybe this just reflects general improvements in the supporting DLP chipsets over the last few years. Either way I think it is great as better motion handling was the biggest reason I was looking forward to OLED displays. But now that I have seen the Sharp I don't feel so bad waiting as things are so much more improved from my perspective.

Do you recall a scene where you saw this noise? My assumption (as I've said before) is that this "noise" is high frequency detail that is actually in the source. The fact that you don't see it with e-shift enabled wouldn't surprise me, as I have to believe enabling it will remove some of this detail. Unless things have drastically changed, the pixel response time in the LCOS chips is already too slow for normal film content. Turning on e-shift requires these same chips to switch in half the time as before, which must result in some loss of detail. For static images this effect is probably not visible, but when things are in motion there has to be some degree of resolution loss occurring.

Normally this type of noise is attributed to the dithering effect used by DLP to generate color tones. One way to rule this out as the cause is to find the scene where you see the noise, and then hit pause. Go up to the screen and see if there is any visible dithering noise in the paused image. If there isn't, it means the noise you are seeing is high frequency noise native to the source (like mosquito noise or film gran) and isn't an artifact of the Sharp. The fact you don't see it with e-shift could be because e-shift is smearing out the detail (averaging it over several pixels) in a kind of noise reduction.

The other option could be if you have the "Color Enhancement" option enabled. In my testing I found that this significantly increased dithering noise, and it is set to level 3 by default in Move 1 mode. For all my viewing I have this turned down to zero. You might want to try seeing if it is turned on, and if so disable it before watching the problematic scenes again.

I still remember years ago when I saw either the RS-1 or the RS-2 for the first time. I had just recently watched Spider-Man 2 (if I remember right) in the cinema on a DLP unit and recalled how grainy the film used in that move was. But then watching it on the JVC I was shocked that it was almost invisible. The picture didn't look anything like the source, it was much too clean and smooth. It was pretty clear to me at the time that the JVC just couldn't resolve the grain and it was getting smeared out. I assume things have improved on the JVC side since then, but then again adding e-shift into the mix can't help matters out.

I set all the enhancement options to 0 prior to doing a Chromapure auto-calibrate. The noise I am referring to may in fact be high frequency detail from the source. I noticed it in films primarily. With the JVC e-shift enabled the noise is not as pronounced; the image produced is more pleasing. To be clear, the difference is very subtle.

Any new findings?

I have decided to return the Sharp 30K. The slight quality improvement for 3D over the W1070 was not worth the extra money to me. The 2D is very good, but not as good as the JVC with e-shift. If I didn't own the JVC already, and couldn't afford to have a two projector solution, I would have kept this. It is a very nice DLP and I would recommend it for a single PJ solution.

Willie

Lack of FI in 3D is a deal breaker. If it had this, I would be all over it.

As an HTPC user there are several options out there for FI currently, so I see this as a non issue. I also think that people using only a blu-ray player for an entire home theater is quite odd. If you really want FI you can spend $300 on an HTPC and use it as your blu-ray player with TONS of extra options for post processing (like FI). I also think that the FI algorithms from the PC software are better than what I've seen on the projectors I've owned with FI systems (JVC's clear motion drive, Mitsubishi's).

What algorithm are you talking about specifically? SVP?

I believe the latest MadVR release also has FI.

Yes, SVP is one of the them. MadVR recently came out with one. I personally like the MadVR one when watching with a display set to 60hz or higher. It keeps the 24fps look at 60hz amazingly well. There are a couple more I can't remember off the top of my head.

Yeah, I guess those of us Oppo owners are "odd"

Using a HTPC is clunky at best IMO.

How is it clunky? You can do everything and more that an Oppo player does. People who use Windows Media Player have a "clunky" source player, I'll give you that. If you use a player like Media Player Classic with the right renderer, decoders, and splitter you can get better results than an Oppo player can give you.

Media Player Classic - Home Cinema with MadVR, ReClock, FFDShow Audio/Video Decoder, and LAV's Splitter is basically the ultimate setup as far as I'm concerned. The amount of fine tuning you can do with each is astonishing and MUCH more powerful and useful for a tweaker as opposed to an Oppo player.

If you use a front end like XBMC, you can use MPC-HC as the default player. The two combined give you home theater bliss.

If you haven't used a setup like this then you shouldn't be making any sort of claim that it is "clunky". If you have and still think it's clunky you haven't set it up properly and if you haven't used it, it makes you sound like you don't know what you're talking about and thus shouldn't be making comments like that.
Edited by Seegs108 - 2/22/13 at 4:51pm

And let me clarify, there is nothing wrong with an Oppo player. There are just so many things they can't do that an HTPC can. My point wasn't to discredit blu-ray players. My point was that only having a blu-ray player to play EVERYTHING you have is a bad idea especially if you're investing thousands upon thousands of dollars in multiple home theater devices. When I hear people complaining that a projector doesn't have an FI system I can understand the disappointment but there is an easy and relatively cheap (in comparison to the multi-thousand dollar investment in everything else) to fix that issue. Like I said, from my experience, the algorithms that these PC FI systems offer are excellent and should be looked at. People spending all this money shouldn't limit themselves to just one source component, especially when HTPCs are very cheap, easy to setup, and can give you a better experience once setup properly than any blu-ray player (including an Oppo) can give you.

I've been setting up HTPC's for years. An HTPC capable of stable 2D and 3D BD ISO playback is DOA for anyone who isn't a hardcore computer enthusiast willing to spend the time to get it configured right. J6P isn't setting up MadVR, ReClock, FFDShow, etc.

Every time I feel like revisiting it, I'd sooner just use my $199 Mediator and jump around 20+ TB of storage and play back 2D and 3D ISO's which is does surprisingly well.

My HTPC's main purpose in life now is hosting the Ceton quad tuner card and running MCE7 which it does very well. PowerDVD and TMT can be temperamental with 3D playback.

I have 2 nice Shuttle SFF's with top shelf parts waiting for something else to do these days. Maybe VMWare 5.x or Hyper-V 2012 hosts.


@ Willie - Did you send it back yet? I can send the 3D file tonight, sorry for the delay. I was hoping we could find out the 3D lumen output.

I will agree that it may take a little time to get it setup properly, but I would argue the learning curve is not very high. Most of the settings needed are pretty much self explanatory. All one needs is the recommendation on what software to use. The ones I mentioned are really the best of the best out there. They are all free to download too. There are several forums out there, just like this one, that will provide step-by-step pictured instructions to set it up properly. Once it's set up, it gives a much better experience over any blu-ray player. I had a Dune HD101. It doesn't have a stock media manager (you can load one on there if you want) but sifting through 22TB of media can be cumbersome through the UPnP software on most of these source components. This is why something similar to XBMC is almost always required when you have this much media. It becomes a pain in neck to manage everything with out it. XBMC with my 22TB of movies and recoreded TV shows has done wonders for me and it looks great too!

@ Seegs108 - Prior to my Oppo 103 I watched all my Blu-ray on an HTPC setup nicely with MPC-HC, LAV filters, and reclock. Could be placebo, but I think the Oppo's image is better. Maybe it is the Qdeo processor. I don't know. I do know that like Zombie all I use an HTPC for now is MCE with my Ceton as a DVR.

@ Zombie - I did send it back. I had to get it out today to get it returned in the 14 day return window for the Groupon deal. If the price drops further I still might pick one up. I have the luxury of waiting.

A bit off topic: If you have a Netgear router check out Netgear Genie for Android (might be available for iOS as well). It will let you push movies to any DLNA playback device on your network bypassing the playback devices interface using the Netgear Genie application. I use it to push from my Rackstation server to my Oppo. If the Mediator is a DLNA device (guessing it is) it should work with it as well. The Mediator is on my short list because of the ISO playback . . .

Willie

It's placebo. The Qdeo processor is great for upscaling. If you take a look at many reviews, the blu-ray play back, in terms of picture quality, looks no better than any other accurate flagship BD player on the market. Unless you are enabling something on the Qdeo processor that is altering the image to give a false sense of superiority in image quality there is no reason a blu-ray will look better than an HTPC, or on that of many other flagship blu-ray players from Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, ect. The video encoded on blu-ray is very specific. It isn't like upscaling where there are a multitude of options to achieve different results.

So you're saying Z30000 is superior to W1070 in 3D? Even though W1070 has triple flash (144 Hz)?

The difference is not dramatic I am splitting hairs. The 3D on the Sharp had better color and deeper blacks and was a bit easier on my eyes. I am sure with tweaking I can get the BenQ to approach it. Someone else may like the BenQ more. It is pretty close which was the point of saving $1,100. In the end I can add the money to my JTR fund.

Willie