Last week I had the pleasure of taking delivery of my first batch of Sharp XV-Z20000 projectors. For those who don’t know, this is Sharp’s “comeback” piece. Why do I say that? Well Sharp had a huge presence in the HT market with the intro of the XV-Z9000, XV-Z10000, and then XV-Z12000 projectors (all 720p units with sequentially upgraded chips). Then they didn’t have a release for a couple years. The problem was that everyone else had come out with their DC3 versions, but Sharp was nowhere to be found. They did end up releasing their XV-Z12000MkII DC3 unit, but it was a tad late to the market and didn’t get much press. Well they rectified that with this new model. This is the latest 1920x1080p single chip DLP unit from Sharp, and let me tell you, they certainly came out with a bang. This unit has about everything one could want in a projector and only retails for $9995. It offers a long throw zoom lens, which is capable of 1.85-2.5x the screen width. This is uncommonly long for the 1080p single chip units to date, so this may be a plus for many of you. Of course the unit also has lens shift. The range on this unit is capable of being anywhere from the top of the screen to the middle of the screen (assuming inverted ceiling mount). There is no negative offset, so for those with high ceilings, this means you will have to drop your unit down a bit to avoid keystone adjustments. I should mention the lens is completely manual so on the fly adjustment is not as simple as some of its competitors. The unit uses a 7-segment color wheel and a 220 watt lamp, so it is capable of a cleaner image and decent brightness. It has the full gamut of inputs, including 2 HDMI and a DVI, 2 component/RGBHV (switchable), an S-Video and a composite video. The unit also has RS232, a 12v trigger and IR input port, so basically any installation requirements are covered. It does include a cable cover as well such that the rear connections can be hidden, making for a cleaner looking installation.

I grabbed the box and brought it into my theater. The box is decent sized which led me to believe the projector was decent sized as well. However, when I opened it I found the projector was about the same size as its predecessors, and the box was just oversized to protect in shipping. I took the unit out and the first thing I noticed was the color…gloss black. Very nice. In addition, the words “SharpVision” are written on the top of the unit in a slick looking font, in chrome. Some may love this, some may not. Personally I thought it looked, well, sharp. The unit, though decent sized, was not all that heavy. This did make for easier handling and mounting onto my ceiling, so that is just what I did. I also got out the remote. This is very well laid out and the buttons are not cramped. In addition, many of the functions, including all inputs, are 1 touch accessible (no scrolling), which will make for easier master control programming and macros. Now I got to turn it on and fed my test pattern generator into it. First impression…bright! Granted at this point there was no adjustments done, but it was noticeably brighter than some of the competitors (so far). I noticed that brightness was set way high, so it appeared washed out a bit. I ran through the standard adjustments to get them where they needed to be, and then setup my color analyzer to start the grayscale. Before I made any adjustments, I set the menu color temp setting to 6500k. Now normally, this gets you into the ballpark but there is a lot of adjusting that needs to be done. Not with the Sharp. I tested out at 6480k out of the box! This tracked pretty well done into the lower IRE’s but then spiked a bit at about 30IRE. I wanted to do a tad of bias adjustments to rectify that, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it to respond so I wonder if the function was inactive. I should mention that in addition to the gain/bias RGB adjustments, this unit does also have RGB Gamma. So essentially calibration was a breeze, which is great for you DIYers. I did also play with the C.M.S (see below). Here I was able to adjust the primary and secondary colors in order to track them to CIE standards.

At this point I decided to play around in the menu. There is a LOT to do in there. The unit offers 2 lamp settings, high and low. Note: High setting has more than average fan noise. Low setting is about average or maybe a tad less than average. I preferred the low setting since in my setup the projector is directly above the front row of seating, and it extends lamp life from 2000 to 3000 hours. Moving on. There is also an Iris adjustment. Now this is not a Dynamic Iris, but rather a 3 position adjustment. The settings are called High Brightness, Medium Mode, and High Contrast (guess what each does). I did take various measurements at each setting which are reported below. The unit also has 2 NR circuits, one for Mosquito noise and one for Digital NR. There are 3 settings for each so that you can customize to your liking. It also has a Progressive mode setting, Film mode setting and Brilliant Color setting (which is not on most of the competitors 1080p units). One feature that is neat with the unit is called Unveil. This is a 3d like adjustment that is simple to use, and allows the image to have a deeper look to it (more on that later). As I mentioned before, there was the C.M.S (Color Management System). This is where the adjustments for the primaries/secondaries are, so you can track them in order to get it spot on. There are also many other adjustments available in the various menus that allow one to set the unit to ones particular liking. For those who like to tinker, this will not disappoint.

At this point, I took off my gear and plugged in a source. Time to start looking at an image. I first threw in an HD DVD to get a feel for what this was really capable of. The picture, in true DLP fashion, was very sharp and detailed. I played around with the various settings in the menu. I found I loved the Unveil feature as it really did give a more 3d like image. I didn’t care for the Brilliant Color as I found it oversaturated everything and gave a less lifelike look to it. The NR features did help some, but I preferred them off in my watching. The colors are very rich on this unit. In fact, it rivals that of some of the 3 chip DLP’s I have seen. Black levels were great in the High Contrast mode, but I found it lacked some “pop”, even on my Silverstar. I actually preferred the Medium Mode as it was a good compromise between the contrast and brightness. The High Brightness mode is going to be good for those watching with ambient light (ie. Football games during the day), and tough the contrast was quite a bit lower in this mode, it still looked very good. The Sharp was extremely clean as well. In fact this is one of the cleaner looking DLP’s I have seen to date. Very little digital noise in the background. When I put in the standard DVD’s, I found similar results. In fact, the standard DVD’s, feeding direct into the Sharp, actually looked better than I have seen them on any other 1080p machine. I am not sure what processor the Sharp uses (information wasn’t available at the time of this writeup), but it does an excellent job with standard definition signals. I did play with the AutoContrast feature and its various settings. I did not see a lot of change in the image, although on some scenes there was a somewhat noticeable improvement. All in all I preferred this feature at the lowest “on” setting (Level 1).

Phantom of the Opera

More shots:

Incredibles

Ultraviolet