Sharp XV-Z20000 to support 1080/24p!

Hello everybody.

I'm quite proud to report that after doing some serious lobbying for weeks now and writing eMails almost on a daily basis to any official Sharp contact I could think of TODAY I FINALLY received a very kind response from Mr. Sean P. McBride
, Sharp Product Marketing Manager CONFIRMING that the Z20k will receive a firmware upgrade enabling 24p support in MARCH 2007. This software fix will be available as a download through the official Sharp service site which can be accessed through www.sharpusa.com

This was perhaps the last grief I (and following his review, Greg Rogers for that matter) have had about this IMHO just gorgeous projector. At last I'm as happy as I can be with this purchase.

Hope this is very good news for a couple of fellow forum members!

Out of respect for everybody who preordered the RS-1 I hesitate to post a full blown report but I highly recommend reading Greg Rogers eye opening review - about the only thing to be critized was the lack of 24p support

fan noise is "acceptable" - nowhere near as silent as the Pearl/HC5000, but FAR from being as annoying as the HD81. I would rate it about average for quality 1-chip DLP.

It puts out about 850 lumen (with ~ 2000:1 On/Off) even with 160h on my lamp - high brightness (open iris)/full power mode. It is a pleasant surprise that the lamp hasn't lost significant brightness after 160h - this is testament to a very efficient cooling design and the use of a relatively low power (220W), high quality lamp. So if you need it it can be plenty bright. But I actually prefer High Contrast mode/low power mode which is plenty bright for a 8 feet wide Studiothek 130 (cushed 10 feet screen...) in my black hole and gives great black levels.

The most striking aspects of the 20k IMHO are dimensionality (combination of plenty On/Off, amazing "ANSI"/intra image contrast,...., and state of the art lens), crispness (LENS!!!), almost non-existing artifacting DLP's are typically infamous for (eg. False Contouring has finally become a non-issue) and probably above all - COLOR + it can be tweaked to perfection.

I recommend demoing this unit - with a "good" setup -> great source material, black room, total light control- AND probably NOT a side by side shootout where both projectors "wash each other out" - in short: If you have a projector with that level of intra-scene contrast you NEED the best possible room to really appreciate the impact.

A side by side shootout will ALWAYS relatively favor the projector with less intra-scene contrast as the room/environment limits the maximum on-screen (read: real world) intra-scene contrast and therefor having 800:1 ANSI doesn't show. So perhaps, just perhaps, some (in)famous side-by-side shootout with a very famous competing product was not entirely "fair" in the end... (Oh my god, I'm starting again...)

Have a good day!

Yes, my unit has this problem too. I have talked with high ranked Sharp contacts in Hamburg and the US about it - they were unaware of the issue but are now "looking into it".

Darin,

1080p/24 is a standardized format which runs at NTSC's 59.94 rate/ 2.5 = 23.976 Hz. I know for a fact that they use the Pioneer HD-1 BluRay to validate this feature - so everything should be just fine

Not really annoying for me, I have to look for it. It is there but sitting 1.4x screen width it is not really an issue while watching a movie. Nevertheless I sure hope this gets corrected.

???

forget it - 1920x1080 works just fine (1:1 pixel mapping)

It is just about two segments of about 300 pixels each in the right corner of the bottom line (it is always the bottom line - no matter if you use the proj up-side down or on a shelf - so its procesing related) and just with 1080p input of any kind (1080i is just fine). These two segments get updated with a ~ 0.2/~0.5 seconds delay to the rest of the picture.