NEC NP-PA653UL Projector Review – Hardware 2

NEC NP-PA653UL Projector Review – Hardware 2: Control Panel, Remote Control

The control panel is located on the left-front side of the projector when it is sitting on a table top, looking at the lens. It’s well laid out in a nice square-shaped panel. There are four buttons on the top: Power, Focus, Zoom, and Shift.

Tap the Power button once for on, twice to turn the projector off. The Focus button, to the right of Power, is used to activate the motorized lens’ focus function. Press once, then used the left and right arrow keys below to adjust the center and peripheral focus. I like this feature, as you can really get the whole image in focus, from the center to the image’s corners.

The Zoom button is next, and is used to activate the lens’ motorized zoom – another useful feature. This, and the button next to it – Shift – are particularly awesome for placement flexibility. That you can save Lens Memory on the PA653UL is another plus, since you’ll be able to load your preferences and not touch the control panel again (or for a very long time).

A note on that – it’s likely that you’ll be using the control panel once, and that’s when the projector is being installed. (Rental and Staging folks notwithstanding).  For most business and education applications, we see these types of projectors ceiling mounted. For a lot of commercial applications, this means the projector is quite high off the ground and not readily accessible during a lecture or presentation. But hey – that’s why we have remote controls.

Below the Power button, there is an Input button to cycle through the inputs, with the aid of the up and down directional arrow keys, of course. Speaking of those, they’re right in the center of the control panel – four in number – and they surround the Enter button. This is a really traditional layout. Below that, on the lower left-hand corner, lives the Menu button to open up the menus of the PA653UL, of which there are many. Opposite the Menu button is the Exit button, used to exit such menus, as well as any of the other adjustment menus like Focus or Zoom.

The remote control has quite a lot of buttons, some serving dual functions. Starting at the top, there are two power buttons – Standby on the left and, on the right, the On button. Press On once to power on, Standby twice to power off. Below, we have the Freeze, Blank, Mute, and AV Mute buttons. Freeze is used to “pause” a picture. Blank, Mute, and AV Mute are interrelated. Blank turns off the video, Mute turns off the audio, and AV Mute turns off both.

The next four buttons, from left to right, are Test, Edge Blend., Multi., and Geometric. The Test button displays a test image to be used at the time of projector setup. Edge Blend. activates the Edge Blending function, and Multi. brings up the Multi-Screen sub-menu within the Display Menu for handling projections from multiple projectors. Geometric. triggers the Geometric Correction menu.

Below that are the final four buttons in this section of the remote: Input, PIP, PBP/POP, and Auto Adj. Input, of course, brings up the Inputs menu. The PIP button is for Picture In Picture and PBP/POP button is for Picture By Picture or Picture On Picture. Auto Adj. is used to automatically adjust the picture quality if the edges of your screen are cut off or the projection quality is bad when projecting a signal from the computer video input, HDMI 1 In, HDMI 2 In, DisplayPort In, or HDBaseT In/Ethernet ports.

The next section has the standard 1-9 plus 0 number buttons, and some of these serve a dual purpose. The number 1 also acts as a trigger for the HDMI 1 input, 2 is for HDMI 2, and 3 changes the input to DisplayPort. The number 4 button switches the input to Computer, and 5, to HDBaseT. There are two buttons on either side of the 0 button. On the left, there is the ID Set button, which allows you to assign an ID to the projector. If using multiple projectors, you can assign the same ID to each and use one remote to control them all. On the right, there’s a Clear button.

Underneath that, we have the traditional directional arrow keypad surrounding an Enter button. On the top left of the keypad, there’s the Menu button to bring up the menus, and on the right, the Exit button to exit the menus. On the bottom left, there’s a L-Click button, and to the right, a R-Click button.

Directly below the L-Click button, we have a dual-function + and – set of buttons. These control Volume and, alternatively, Focus. Next to the + button is the Shutter button, which closes the shutter so no light shines through. Under that, there’s the Lens Shift button, and to the right, another set of + and – buttons that control D-Zoom and Zoom.

The next set of buttons are quick-selects for various menu options. The Picture button brings up the Picture menu, Display brings up the Display menu, Aspect provides quick selection of aspect ratio, Color brings up Color Temperature adjustment, and the Setup buttons, the Setup menu.

The Final buttons are the CTL, ECO, Info, and Help Buttons. CTL is the button you press to enable the secondary functions of other buttons, such as Focus or Zoom. The ECO button brings up a menu for Lamp Mode, where you can choose from four options. The Info button brings up the Info menu. And finally, the Help button. This brings up a different part of the Info menu. That’s it. As you can tell, it’s a hefty remote that can do a lot, and will serve its master well.