PT-DW5000 Widescreen Projector Review - Image Quality 2

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Art Feierman

Performance on Videos

Some user video applications will sacrifice "perfect' color handling in exchange for raw brightness in combatting significant ambient light. Other user situations will be more traditional, very low light, to fully darkened room conditions, with the emphasis on best possible color and contrast. I have taken a number of photos to give you a good idea of the Panasonic's capabilities on video, under these different environments.

I think it best to look first, at how the Panasonic PT-DW5000U does in a darkened room. For this purpose I photographed several scenes from DVD that I normally use in evaluating home theater projectors. The scenes include from DVD; Lord of the Rings, and from HD-DVD; Phantom of the Opera, and Serendipity. Most are shot in Cinema mode. (Please note, all were shot without calibrating the projector, so this gives you a really good idea of "out of the box" performance. A quick calibration futher improves color accuracy, to truly excellent levels. All images are with contrast set to standard (not High Contrast) unless otherwise indicated.

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All of the darkened room images were shot in my testing room, projecting a 100" diagonal image on a High Contrast Gray surface fixed wall screen (from Elite Screens).

Let's start with some images to show off the Panasonic's ability to handle flesh tones:

Cinema mode

Contrast Mode

Dynamic mode

You can see some loss of highlight detail in the near white areas, in Dynamic mode, as well as some shift in color, yet, overall, Dynamic mode does a respectable job, if you need the full "horsepower" of the DW5000U.