PT-DW5000 Widescreen Projector Review - Image Quality 3

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Art Feierman

Due to projector placement limitations, the image size projected was approximately 115" diagonal. For the ambient light, two glass french doors toward the back of the left wall, have their shades up, allowing sunlight to hit the back wall. The small image you see here, gives you the best idea of how the room actually looks. The image of Ganalf on the screen, however is not from the Panasonic, but from the far less powerful Mitsubishi HD4000 review. The same image and others were shot less than 30 minutes later with the Panasonic hooked up.

Click Image to Enlarge

The first photo of Gandalf has the Panasonic PT-DW5000U in Cinema mode, standard contrast, dual lamp. The second photo uses the same exact exposure, to show you how much brighter the projector is with all settings the same, except for Dynamic mode instead of Cinema. In botht images, the ambient light on the walls around the screen appears significantly darker than the rooms actual condition shown in the small image above. This exposure was necessary to keep the screen of Gandalf from being overexposed, since it is much brighter than the room itself. In the second photo, since the exposure remained the same, this Gandalf image is definitely overexposed, with all the highlight areas blown out. Of course in actual watching the highlight information is all there. You can easily tell that the Panaasonic projector has plenty of power to hand a decent amount of ambient light, even on a gray surface screen approaching 10 foot diagonal.

PT-DW5000U in Cinema mode

PT-DW5000U in Standard mode

You can easily tell that the Panaasonic projector has plenty of power to hand a decent amount of ambient light, even on a gray surface screen approaching 10 foot diagonal.

Contrast and Black level performance is excellent for a commercial business projector. Panasonic only claims 2000:1 contrast in it's High contrast mode, and does not quote a contrast ratio for standard contrast mode, but I suspect it isn't dramatically lower. Black levels are pretty impressive, roughly comparable to most home theater projectors of just a couple of years ago.

Above is one of the same images I use in my home theater projector reviews for looking at shadow details. The Panny does a good job along the bottom and inside the shed on the right. I would venture that, in this regard, it easily exceeds most LCD projectors that might compete with it.