Panasonic PT-MZ670U Projector Review – Picture and Sound Quality

Panasonic PT-MZ670U Projector Review – Picture and Sound Quality: Color Modes, Video Image Quality, Text and Presentation Image Quality, Audio Quality

The Panasonic PT-MZ670U has six color modes, most of which have rather excellent color. In fact, there are three bright and usable modes to choose from, and the choice will really come down to the application and desired brightness of the mode. The projector’s best mode is Standard, closely followed by Natural. The latter mode as an interesting characteristic in that when you’ve got a computer input going, it’s called natural, but when you’ve got a Blu-ray player plugged in, such as my PS4 Pro, that input’s name changes to Cinema. Natural/Cinema has a warm tone to it, favoring a more yellowish/orange hue than Standard, which has a distinctly cool, blue tone. I like Standard for presentations and infographics, and Natural/Cinema for video, as it does well on skin tones.

The next best mode is White Board, which is actually the brightest mode, and is just a tad bit more yellowy-green than Natural/Cinema. This is typical of brightest modes. I actually expected Dynamic to be the brightest because of the name. It, too, has a tendency to lean toward that yellow-green hue, and it’s not one of the prettier modes. Blackboard’s color has a magenta tone to it – this is typical of Blackboard modes, as they are meant to project on a black surface rather than your standard white screen. DICOM SIM. is a color mode you only want to use when projecting high contrast films, such as X-Rays. Overall, I was impressed by the Panasonic PT-MZ670U’s color!

I thoroughly enjoyed the quality of the MZ670U when projecting videos. This is due, in part, to the laser light engine and 3LCD technology. Like I said previously, 3LCD projectors produce as many color lumens as they do white ones, making their colors more vibrant than, say, their DLP counterparts, who do not produce as many color lumens as white lumens. The laser light engine adds some extra pop and wow, and it really comes across in some of the photos from Journey to Space.

In the slider above, all photos were taken in Cinema Mode. For most scenes, it looked really quite awesome – the only issue I had was with scenes that were color corrected to have a more yellow hue, as the already-yellow Cinema mode interacts with these scenes to make things a bit too yellow for my tastes. Still, this is not a home theater projector, so that’s just not something that really matters. This Panasonic has a rather impressive color management system, so if you’re bothered by that aspect, you’ll likely be able to remedy it with some light tweaking.

This is another area where the Panasonic truly shines. Going back to that laser light engine, I’ve always been more impressed with the sharpness of laser projectors than that of lamp based projectors. It just always looks so good! The MZ670U is a WUXGA projector, but its sharpness nearly rivals that of the NEC NP-PA653UL, another laser, but that one is a WUXGA pixel shifter. I’ll talk more about that later, but suffice it to say that this Panasonic has good enough optics to compare to a pixel shifter of the same resolution. Awesome.

Back to text – super sharp. All of the text, even the smallest text from my presentation and infographic slides, was highly readable. When I projected our test image of the varying font sizes and colors, I could read the 8 point font. Now, my room only goes about 12 feet back from the screen, and those viewing will often be from further back, so I doubt that same size would be readable from the back of a lecture hall or auditorium. 8 point font is almost never used, however, especially in a presentation format, so this hardly matters – I mention it to make the point that even the smallest font is clear and not a jumbled mess of pixels like it is on some other projectors.