Panasonic PT-AR100U Projector Calibration and Settings

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Art Feierman

For your convenience we repeat the Panasonic PT-AR100U's (click for specs) brightness and color temp measurements from the Performance page Let's take a look at the numbers:

Panasonic PT-AR100U Color Temperature

Lumen Output and Color Temp at 100 IRE (white)
Cinema 1	798 @ 754
Vivid Cinema	1497 @ 7493
Game	1472 @ 10001
Normal	1571 @ 9114
Dynamic	1914 @ 7586, 1325 with Dynamic Iris Off
Rec. 709	822 @ 7171
Sports	1755 @ 7985

Before we provide our settings, let's see what we started out with: Pre calibration, these are the color temperatures over the grayscale range:

Here's a look at the preset modes, showing brightness and color temperature for white (100 IRE).

* Just leave it on!

There are two additional modes - 3D Dynamic and 3D Cinema We don't have a good way to determine actual brightness to one's eyes when watching 3D, so no numbers are presented.

Panasonic PT-AR100U Basic Settings

Settings for measurements (default values are in parenthesis):
	Cinema 1	Vivid Cinema	Game	Normal	Dynamic	Rec. 709	Sports
Contrast (0)	0	-1	-2	-2	3	-2	-2
Brightness (0)	1	2	4	2	0	4	4
Color (0l)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Tint (0)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

In addition to calibrating Red Green and Blue for a correct grayscale balance (6500K), there are a number of other settings that come into play. Typically Contrast and Brightness (white balance and black balance), need to be done first. Color saturation and gamma also need adjustment. In the case of the PT-AR100U projector, most of these default settings were fairly close to ideal, with only contrast altered more than slightly in most modes.

Settings for measurements (default values are in parenthesis):

Color Temp is at default (0) on all
Lamp Mode=Normal (unless noted otherwise)
Dynamic Iris On.
All other settings at default (untouched)

Panasonic PT-AR100U Post Calibration Grayscale

Color Temp over IRE Range (Post calibration REC 709 mode)
20 IRE =	6626
30 IRE =	6465
40 IRE =	6393
50 IRE =	6360
60 IRE =	6326
70 IRE =	6420
80 IRE =	6570
90 IRE =	6607
100 IRE =	6471
Average gamma = 2.18

PT-AR100U Greyscale Calibration

❮ ❯

Here are MIke's comments and the charts his equipment produce:

Rec. 709 has the best RGB balance by far, despite the somewhat high color temp. Color gamut is reasonably good with the Rec. 709 mode (as you’d expect from that name). Gamma is only around 2.11 with default settings and the simple gamma adjustments must be used sparingly to avoid poor results. As we noted, Dynamic is pretty good by default, so the Quick Cal really only improves it marginally. Greater improvement would cause a large drop in lumen output.

PT-AR100U RGB Settings

HC5020 Post Calibration settings
	Cinema (on User 1)		Quick Cal of Dynamic (on User 2)
Contrast	R	5	R	10
	G	-4	G	-15
	B	-4	B	-15
Brightness	R	-2	R	0
	G	0	G	0
	B	1	B	0

Below are Mike's adjustments for the REC 709 and Dynamic modes. Again, the goal of "best" is a great looking 6500K grayscale, and the goal of a "brightest" mode is to improve a bright mode in terms of color as it relates to watchability, but without compromising brightness too much..

Ok, that's all we have for you. try our PT-AR100U settings out, if you like, you can save them in the Memory area, and compare against the default settings. Shouldn't take but a few minutes to put them in.