Panasonic PT-D5700U DLP Projector
The PT-D5700U is a new large venue projector with innovative features, some of which cross over from the home theater and digital cinema channels. It’s nominally a 6,000 lumens XGA (1024x768) model for installation, although at 31 pounds it could also be used in temporary staging, rolling cart, and tabletop applications.
The design of the PT-D5700U can best be described as functional. It’s got a flat, rectangular shape with a smooth white top cover. No control buttons are to be found here, they’re all placed on the right rear panel, next to a pair of five-inch boxer exhaust fans. That means you can stack this projector quite easily, or slide it into some pretty tight spaces.
As an installation projector, the PT-D5700U supports six interchangeable lenses. The supplied lens is a 1.8 – 2.4:1 powered zoom type with power lens shift available for vertical image offset (±50%). A knob just to the right of the lens mount takes care of horizontal lens shift (±25%).
Connectors
The connector complement is sufficient to handle any type of signal you can throw at the projector, including HDCP (copy-protected) video from DVD players and set-top boxes. You’ll find one each composite and S-video input jacks, a 5xBNC jack field that accepts both RGBHV and YPbPr component video, and a 15-pin d-sub VGA jack for analog computer signals. This jack also loops-out through a second 15-pin connection to feed a confidence monitor or another projector.
For digital signals, Panasonic has provided a DVI-D jack, which can interface to PC video cards, scalers, seamless switchers, and a host of consumer products such as red laser and blue laser DVD players, set-top boxes, and media servers. The HDCP compatibility means you can also use this projector with HDMI connections.
For control purposes, there are several options. A 1/8-inch mini jack is available for wired operation from the remote, and this jack loops out as well to feed other Panasonic projectors. You’ll also find a nine-pin d-sub jack for proprietary control systems. Next to that is a RS232C jack for conventional operation, and this loops out to a similar jack.
The last option for control is an RJ-45 jack for connection to a local area network. You can “talk” to the PT-D5700U using any standard Web browser and operate most of the projector functions, monitor a wide range of operating parameters including three different temperature sensors, and have the projector email you and others automatically in case of a failure or potential problem.
Operation
There’s a wealth of things you can play with beneath the main menu, which has a Picture Menu for primary adjustments, an Advanced Menu for detailed tweaks, and two Option Menus for settings things like lamp operation, front/rear screen setup, etc.
The image adjustments will be of greatest interest to all. In addition to the basic tweaks (contrast, brightness, color saturation, color hue, and sharpness), Panasonic provides five image presets that create a wide variance in image brightness. The brightest of them is Dynamic, a mode that results in blazingly bright images with a noticeable greenish-blue colorcast.
Unless you really need the photons, stick with Graphic, Standard, Cinema, or Natural modes. You’ll get better gamma performance and it will be easier to achieve good white balance, particularly if you are showing video or film material. Three color temperature settings are also provided (Default, High, and Middle) and you can fine-tune each with RGB high and low adjustments.
Another adjustment that affects brightness is a 10-step White Boost control. What this does is increase or decrease the number of times the white segment of the color wheel is flashed during a given time interval. (The other segments are green, blue, and red.) Just switching from a value of +10 to 0 can drop brightness by 45%.
Six different aspect ratio settings are provided, along with an Auto mode. These let you zoom in or out of images as needed to fit the height, width, or all of the 4:3 screen area. There’s also a digital image zoom control and blanking for all four sides of the image to clean up any visible sync pulses or vertical interval information from TV programs.
Lamp Operating Modes
The PT-D5700U comes with a pair of lamps, which you can use separately as the occasion demands. In addition, each lamp has a High and Low operating mode, and there’s also an automatic lamp relay that will switch over from one lamp to the other in case of a failure, or if a certain number of hours of operation have accumulated.
For hard image blanking, there’s a mechanical shutter that makes sure the screen is really black. Panasonic has also provided a projector orientation mode (horizontal or vertical) to ensure there’s enough airflow around the lamps and imaging components if you have the PT-D5700U mounted in an unusual position—like straight down. An altitude operating setting completes the picture. It is selected at about 4,950 feet and changes airflow and fan speed to compensate for lower air pressure.
Color Correction and Edge Blending
As mentioned earlier, there are numerous image tweaks available on this projector, including three separate color-tuning sub-menus. The first lets you set the intensity of either three primaries or six primaries and white, using 2,039 steps. This setting is primarily for luminance (saturation) and won’t correct hue (phase) errors.
You can also use a colorimeter to measure three or six primaries from one PT-D5700U, save those readings, and enter them into another projector to ensure precise color matching for stacking or edge blending. In this menu, you can set the X and Y coordinates for each primary color along with the X and Y coordinates for white. Luminance levels can also be set here to favor RGB or YUV color weighting.A third color menu lets you set the intensity of red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow, but these settings do not correspond to specific color space values or weights—rather, they’re more like consumer “I want my reds to pop!” settings and would be best left alone.
The edge blending menu options are numerous. You can feather any edge of the 4:3 screen with a long or short pixel overlap and also make small changes in brightness at the join to help mask the transition from one screen to the next. Edge blending for seamless projection looks really cool, but you’ve got to have consistent white balance and edge illumination to pull it off.
Performance
Fortunately, the PT-D5700U has both. In my tests, brightness uniformity averaged 94% from center to the average corner and 77% to the worst corner. It would be hard to see much in the way of light fall-off with that kind of performance. White balance across the screen was also consistent. I measured a shift of just 131K using a nine-point measurement with the reference color temperature set to D6500.
All of the picture settings result in different levels of brightness. With the zoom lens at mid-point and white boost set to five, I measured 2,959 lumens in Standard mode. That soared to 5,593 lumens in Dynamic mode and fell somewhat in Cinema mode to 3,454 lumens. Both lamps were operating in High mode when I took these readings.
Contrast was low for a DLP projector, measuring 373:1 ANSI and 549:1 peak in Standard mode. Those numbers didn’t vary much in other picture modes. As far as tracking a clean grayscale, the PT-D5700U stayed within 137 degrees of 6,500 Kelvin from 20 IRE to 100 IRE.
The supplied lens provides bright, contrasty images with plenty of detail as long as the input signals are close to native resolution. The internal scaling engine works well with signals up to SXGA (1365x1024) resolution, but starts to decimate pixels above that point. HD 720p and 1080i video displays surprisingly well due to the precise color adjustments and other image tweaks.
Unfortunately, the projector exhibits an S-curve gamma in most high brightness modes, which leads to crushed whites that look like “hot spots” on people and objects in video frames. Turning off the white boost and dialing back brightness a bit cleans this up considerably.
You’ll generally have the best results if you feed the projector progressive scan video sources, such as 480p and 720p, as well as scaling DVD players. The internal de-interlacing circuits are OK, not great, and you’ll see some residual scan line and scaling artifacts on screen from 480i and 1080i video clips.
Conclusion
Panasonic’s PT-D5700U is certainly bright, but its strength is in the multitude of custom adjustments that installers and projectionists will greatly appreciate. A widescreen version (PT-DW5100L, 1280x768) is also available, and Panasonic ought to consider an SXGA+ (1400x1050) SKU as well to reflect the trend towards higher computer resolutions.
Pete Putman heads ROAM Consulting LLC based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. In addition, Putman maintains HDTVexpert.com, a fast-growing website that covers digital TV, HDTV, and display technologies.
