Hey! It’s 2005. Widescreen video is here. HDTV is here. Ready or not, the shape and resolution of our video content is changing (albeit slowly). That’s been evident for some time in the flat panel (plasma and LCD) display market, where you can’t buy a 4:3 screen over 20 inches anymore.
But our front projection systems have been slow to follow suit. Indeed, a majority of the projectors that were shown at InfoComm 2004 had either 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratios, leaving widescreen to the home theater market. Indeed, it’s only recently that mainstream LCD and DLP projector manufacturers such as Sanyo, Christie, and Digital Projection have begun to show significant support for widescreen imaging.
Panasonic is one company that was late to the 16:9 game, but they’ve made up for that with a flourish. Their PT-AE700U front LCD projector has garnered strong reviews for its high-quality color, low black levels (thanks to a unique dynamic iris mechanism) and lack of the ‘screen door’ effect so common to LCD projectors.
Now, Panasonic has followed up with the large-venue PT-DW7000U, a projec- tor that incorporates those same color management and dynamic iris ‘tricks’ and employs a unique trio of .85-inch DMDs with 1,366x768-pixel resolution. These DMDs are not to be found in any other commercial DLP projector (yet) and apparently were specially manufactured by Texas Instruments.
The PT-DW7000U bears a striking resemblance to its groundbreaking predecessor, the PT-D7600U. This model was the first three-chip DLP projector to retail for under $50K, and also the first to use lower-cost UHP lamps instead of more costly and shorter-lived xenon lamps.
While the success of the PT-D7600U is debatable, it did open the door for Panasonic to experiment with this lower-cost approach to DLP imaging. The PT-DW7000U was one result, and the PT-D7700U (1,400x1,050 resolution) was another. But while the latter preserves the ‘traditional’ 4:3 aspect ratio, the former breaks the screen wide open (pardon the pun).
Out of the Box
If you are into ‘basic gray’, this is the projector for you! The PT-DW7000U won’t win any awards for styling; its boxy appearance is designed as a triumph of function over form. The connector complement is basic but thorough, with one composite input, one S-video input, 5 BNC connectors for a multitude of signals formats, and a 15-pin VGA jack.
However, this projector also supports digital signal formats. Panasonic offers several accessory plug-in interface modules, three of which support digital video transport formats (SDI and HD-SDI) plus a digital display format (DVI). Unfortunately, there’s only one such plug-in slot – an additional slot would have been helpful.
The rear panel of the projector is sparse save for a small keypad area. Here, you can operate basic projector functions, zoom/focus/shift the lens, operate the mechanical shutter, and access the menu. These controls can’t be on top of the projector; Panasonic intended for the PT-DW7000U to be stacked and small detents in the top cover are provided for that purpose.
The supplied remote control could have a less cluttered button layout. There are 22 separate keypad buttons, among which are a mousedisk and directional navigation menus. You could easily hit the wrong one in the dark. Fortunately, the remote is backlit. Another nice feature is direct access to any of the four video inputs – many projectors force you to step in sequence through all inputs to find the one you want.
The large lens mount area has a flexible light baffle and features a bayonet locking mechanism to securely attach a lens. It also has a guide pin structure so fitting a lens is not very difficult. Best of all, the electrical contacts for the power zoom and focus functions don’t require plugging in a tiny Molex connector. Instead, the gold-plated contacts simply come together as the lens snaps into place.
There’s also a powerful array of cooling fans in this projector, and they’re none too quiet. The actual fan speed depends on which lamp mode you have selected (single or double, low or high) and running with both lamps on in high mode creates a pretty noisy blower.
Menus and Adjustments
The PT-DW7000U is almost ‘blue collar’ in its menu adjustments. There are plenty of them, but all are essential picture adjustments. Panasonic does provide six image presets (brightness, contrast, gamma, color temperature, etc) if you just want to ‘plug and play’, but you’ll surely want to get into the user mode and make your own tweaks.
There are no multiple color temperature presets. Instead, accessing the white balance menu simply brings up a range of RGB high and low adjustments. Whatever settings you make here are automatically preserved for every input as the user preset. You can also fine –tune gamma to your specific needs, or choose from preset 2.2 and 2.5 gamma settings.
Oddly enough, there are only two aspect ratio choices available for every input – widescreen, and 4:3. (Of course, that’s all the options you’d really need with a native 16:9 projector.) You will have access to adjustable image blanking and horizontal / vertical positioning. In addition, the projector features Panasonic’s unique dynamic iris system, which can manually or automatically change with overall scene luminance to boost black levels.
One neat feature of this projector is its ability to do soft-edge image blending. This is a technique that I practiced in my former life as a producer of corporate business meetings, using exclusively 35mm slide projectors and lots of film masks. Of course, it’s a lot easier and cleaner to execute electronically. The PT-DW7000U lets you adjust the soft edge overlap, edge sharpness, and scene brightness to make sure the seams aren’t visible.
With a soft-edge mask and two of these projectors aligned for a 50% image overlap, you could easily create a Cinemascope-like widescreen presentation, easily driven by products such as Barco Folsom’s BlendPro hardware. Or you could create an even wider screen with as little as a 25% overlap for an effective 3.1:1 aspect ratio.
Performance and Image Quality
For my image quality tests, I set up test patterns on my 1280x1024 desktop PC, an Extron VTG300 pattern generator, and my AccuPel HDG2000 HD pattern generator. (By the way, the projector has several built-in test patterns for setup, including full white and black fields, a crosshatch pattern, and color bars.) For lowresolution video, I hooked up my Panasonic RP56 DVD player, which can send out interlaced or progressive scan video.
The lens supplied for this review was the optional ET-D75LE2 powered zoom with a 2:1 – 3:1 zoom ratio. After calibrating the projector for best grayscale and setting the zoom lens to its midway position, I took four brightness measurements, one for each of the lamp operating modes, as follows:
- Single lamp, low power – 1,536 ANSI lumens
- Single lamp, high power – 2,170 ANSI lumens
- Dual lamps, low power – 3,374 ANSI lumens
- Dual lamps, high power – 4,325 ANSI lumens
None of those readings came close to Panasonic’s spec of 6,000 lumens. However, the ET-D75LE2 has a smaller aperture than the usual short zoom, and that would reduce light output. I can’t say exactly by how much, since none of the available literature on these lenses speci- fied f-stop numbers. (One f-stop difference means a 50% reduction in brightness.)
The PT-DW7000U’s brightness uniformity was excellent at 80% corner to corner, with a worst-case reading of 71.4%. More importantly, the projector also tracks a very clean grayscale, except for a little deviation at the low end. Using a 720p 11-step grayscale ramp, the lowest color temperature I measured was around 4,500 degrees K (near black), but quickly climbed to over 6,000 degrees K and stayed within 200 degrees of that value all the way to 100% white.
Panasonic claims 4,000:1 sequential (onoff) contrast for this projector, a number you can just ignore – it’s too contrived. Connecting a 720p checkerboard pattern, I measured 298:1 ANSI (average) and 498:1 peak contrast, while a 768p checkerboard produced readings of 319:1 ANSI and 597:1 peak. Peak contrast from a 720p 50/50 black and white pattern measured 1,637:1 with that 720p source and 1,958:1 with a 768p checkerboard.
The red, green, and blue color coordinates are outside that of the SMPTE ‘C’ phosphor standard, meaning you can get a wider color gamut with this projector than you can with a CRT. You should be able to calibrate the PT-DW7000U precisely enough for projecting digital cinema content with accurate flesh tones and pastel shades.
Image quality tests were mixed. Despite Panasonic’s strong reputation in video processing, image quality from 480i sources was average to mediocre. Tests with a moving Zone Plate target from the Video Essentials DVD revealed plenty of motion and interlaced scan line artifacts through the composite, S-video, and component inputs.
These were confirmed with the Silicon Optix Realta HQV test pattern DVD, which is an excellent stress test for 480i video processing (http://www.siliconoptix. com/home). This DVD has white bars that rotate clockwise, a waving flag sequence, and a racecar sequence from the Super Speedway DVD that clearly flush out poor interlaced video processing.
Things clean up considerably with progressive scan standard definition TV, so an outboard processor and/or scaler is a smart add-on for this projector. 720p and 1080i HD sources looked the best, and once I calibrated for a D6500 color temperature, I found flesh tones and subtle pastel color shades reproduced very well. An INHD program about the pre-Grammy Awards party revealed excellent color shading, particularly flesh tones and subtle gray shades in all of the formal wear.
The PT-DW7000U also handles PC images exceptionally well. I used one at the Hollywood Post Alliance Technology Retreat in January of this year to show widescreen (1,280x768) Power Point slides. The same projector was also used to screen 1080i and 720p HD clips from various networks with the same color and grayscale quality that I observed.
Conclusion
The PT-DW7000U is a versatile performer that pays attention to grayscale and color reproduction. Many competing models use xenon lamps to achieve a high level of image quality, but this projector does it with less-expensive short-arc mercury lamps. The dynamic iris technology really drops black levels and does improve overall contrast in low-light scenes.
The standard connector interface should handle just about any signal format you could use, but if you need to go digital, the expansion cards are available. The accessory lenses cover a range from short throws to long zooms, and there’s enough light output to spare to accommodate them all. As long as you use this projector to show progressive-scan SD or 720p/1080i HD video content and RGB computer images, you will be satisfied with the resulting image quality.
