Back in the early 1990s, projector design and functionality wasn’t as much of a consideration as getting a bright enough image on the screen. In those days, if you could get 200 to 400 lumens out of the lens, it was a lot. Today, brightness isn’t an issue. Even sixpound projectors can crank out well over 1,500 lumens, and current desktop/installation projectors are operating in the range of 3,500 to 4,500 lumens – enough to light up some pretty big screens with long projection throws. These compact powerhouses aren’t ugly boxes, either.
Sanyo’s new PLC-XP55/L (List: $8,995, lens optional) front LCD projector is a good example of a “modern” desktop/installation projector. It’s got plenty of horsepower (Sanyo rates it at 4,500 lumens) and isn’t too heavy at 20.3 pounds with the supplied lens. But the PLC-XP55/L also has a full rack of analog and digital input connectors, power lens operation including vertical shift, and will even interface to a remote PC via Sanyo’s PJ Net Organizer software.
The increased interest in networked projection and wireless 802.11b interfaces hasn’t been lost on Sanyo. Several of their models now support Local Area Network (LAN) interfaces, offered either as a plug-and-play hookup or as an optional expansion card, which is how the review PLC-XP55/L was equipped.
In terms of connectors, the PLC-XP55/L has more I/Os than you will probably use. There are the standard composite and S-video connections, plus three RCA jacks for a component video input (the “Y” jack doubles as the composite video input), a rack of 5 BNC jacks that can be used for component video or RGB hookups, and a 15-pin VGA jack for a computer. All of this is topped off with a DVI-D interface with support for High Definition Copy Protection (HDCP) and it functions as the second RGB input.
There’s also an on-board audio amplifier, but like most projectors of this kind, the output power (2W) is very light and certainly not usable in much more than a small conference room.
Sanyo’s IP-based interface, PJ Net Organizer, provides a way to “talk” to the projector from a remote PC and find out such interesting things as the power on/off status, which input(s) are active, and how many hours have elapsed on the 300W NSH lamp. You can remotely control all of the PLC-XP55/L’s menu functions from your desktop, and the PJ Net Organizer software can be configured to send out an automatic email alert if something is amiss with the projector. (Sorry, it doesn’t have an ‘Operator Error’ alert.)
The supplied lens for this review was a 1.3:1 ratio power zoom type and you’ll find it puts a pretty crisp picture up on the screen. That shouldn’t be a surprise, as Sanyo’s lenses are manufactured by Canon. You’ll have the ability to adjust focus, zoom, and vertical lens shift from the remote control, although you shouldn’t need to touch any of these once the projector is installed.
Sanyo provides access to just about every image parameter you’d want and there are plenty of memories to save your presets in. One neat feature showing up on Sanyo projectors is a full-color manager menu. In this menu, you can color-correct for specific shades of red, green, and blue, as well as cyan, magenta, and yellow. It takes a bit of practice to get used to this menu, though.
Support for HDTV sources is evident in the choice of widescreen display modes (letterboxed on the 4:3 LCD panels) and compatibility with a variety of standard (720p, 1080i) and non-standard (1080p) scan rates. In fact, the PLC-XP55/L will handle European PAL standards (576i and 576p), too.
In general, Sanyo projectors are among the better performers with recognizing and setting up all kinds of PC and video scan rates, and the PLC-XP55/L carries on that tradition. Using the new Extron VTG-300 test pattern generator, test signals from VGA (640x480) all the way to UXGA (1600x1200) were displayed correctly on the PLC-XP55/L using nothing more than its internal “auto picture” function. The PLC-XP55/L also supports the more exotic HDCP interface, which is really a consumer-world “handshake.” That means you can port digital TV signals from a set-top box (cable, satellite, or terrestrial) directly into the PLC-XP55/L’s DVI connector, no matter where they come from.
In a quick test, the PLC-XP55/L recognized 480p, 720p, and 1080i HDCP signals from a current ATSC-compliant set-top tuner and displayed them as letterboxed widescreen images. This interface will also work with the new breed of DVD players that come equipped with DVI outputs, and some of those (like the Bravo) have built-in video scalers that will output up-converted 720p and 1,080i images from a standard DVD.
The only DVI test signals that gave the projector some trouble were a 1,280x1,024/60 source and a 1,280x768/60 source. Both images were considerably under-scanned. However, it’s not likely you’d be feeding a 1280x768 source to this projector, as that is a wide-screen, flat-panel standard. And you can get a pretty good representation of compressed SXGA by simply using the analog inputs.
For image quality tests, the PLC-XP55/L was operated with its lamp in “Standard” mode with the zoom lens set to its mid-point and the projector calibrated for the widest and smoothest grayscale. I tried to set the projector’s white balance to D6500 or close to it, using a Minolta CL-200 light meter and colorimeter and the red, green, and blue drive controls.
However, this resulted in a magenta color shift with readings in the D6500 range, indicating the projector needed more green correction than I could provide from the menu. So, I opted for the white balance setting that produced the most neutral color of gray, and that turned out to be just a hair over 6700K. Close enough.
The PLC-XP55/L scored a nice trifecta by turning in a brightness reading of 4,235 ANSI lumens (using a nine-point measurement), 317:1 ANSI contrast, and 573:1 peak contrast. That latter number is outstanding for an LCD projector and is usually the province of DLP projectors. The PLC-XP55/L also did well in brightness uniformity tests, measuring 83 percent across the screen on average and 82 percent on the worst corner.
In terms of color temperature uniformity, the projector held a value of gray ranging from 6,560K to 6,814K across a full white screen. That’s a shift of only 250 degrees and it means you won’t see any green or red tints that are so common to less-expensive LCD projectors
Turning to image quality tests, text and images from my PC scored “excellent” and no lens distortion or image pin cushioning was observed. (Must be those Canon optics.) A little lens flare was seen with a fine “H” text pattern, only a slight amount of ringing which could have been due to clipped bandwidth.
Composite video looked quite good on the PLC-XP55/L. Its internal video decoder showed a DVD-generated 480i composite Zone Plate test pattern cleanly with plenty of detail at 300 and 400 lines and little to no noise and color moiré. That means some sort of adaptive comb filtering is at work, and although you may not use the composite input much, it’s nice to know it will give you a good accounting.
Overall, I was quite pleased with the performance of the PLC-XP55/L. It is a bright, versatile all-around projector that is just as happy on a roll-around cart as it would be stacked two and three high in a large venue. Both RGB and video performance are very good (more so than competitive desktop/ installation projectors) and it has a nice combination of features and connections.
