Panasonic PT-AR100U – Overall Color & Picture Quality 2

Posted on July 27, 2013 By Art Feierman

Panasonic PT-AR100U Projector: Performance, HDTV and Sports, including 3D

If there is an element where the PT‑AR100U is truly at home, it’s doing sports and television. I’ve watched a number of hours of sports including some March madness on the PT‑AR100U home entertainment projector, and I have yet to watch anything related to sports or TV, with the room fully darkened! At the very minimum, I have been running with my rear lights on (except for movies). All seven downward facing lights on! Most of the time however, if it’s daytime, I’m also letting some ambient light come in through my shutter windows on the side and in the back of the room. That’s because I can with this Panasonic projector!

That’s because this projector is rated 2,800 lumens, and can actually put 2,400 on the screen, and basically, is simply brighter than anything else out there near the price. Of projectors designed for home, only the two Epsons come close in brightness, and they are not as bright.

Okay, I’ve got a some ambient light present. I fire up your PT-AR100U projector, select my favorite sports game, (it’s March Madness for me at this time) and start off in Dynamic mode. It was evening time so no light coming in through my shades and you know what?

Even projecting a 100 inch diagonal sized image it was too bright to watch so I downscaled it bit. Tried different modes. I found Vivid cinema worked fine. I also enjoyed Sports mode and normal works if you don’t like the more blues than red. It’s particularly cool but it’s the next brightest mode and a little softer in contrast than dynamic. Ultimately, pick your mode that matches the room and you should thoroughly enjoy the sports. Mind you, the PT-AR100U does not have CFI, but that’s a matter for a different page.

We’ve taken an exceptional number of images to demonstrate modes with this Panasonic projector. Below first, is a series of images taken with a lot of ambient light in the room including sunlight. You can see the images of the room first and now you’ve got photos looking anywhere from very watchable to pretty much washed out. The most watchable being the dynamic brightest mode, the dimmest being Cinema 1 and the REC 709 modes. There is another set with more modest ambient light, and then for all these other images of sporting events, those were all taken with the projector in sports mode (note not calibrated, just the default sports mode). The rest are HDTV images that you see (Victoria Secret and other such things). A couple were taken in Sports because I forgot to switch. The really good looking ones were done in REC 709, which is the calibrated “best” mode.