PT-DW5000U Projector Review - Warranty, Summary

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Art Feierman

This fine Panasonic projector comes with a very fine warranty: Two years parts and labor. IN addition, it comes with Zip-It, Panasonic's overnight loaner program. If your machine drops dead Panasonic will provide you with another one to use, while yours is being serviced. And they will send out the loaner before you send yours in. Everyone should appreciate an overnight loaner (or replacement) program, and especially those with critical applications (like 24/7), or rental and staging companies.

Strangely, when you reach this level of projector, the warranties vary tremendously from one manufacturer to another. And optional warranties are often also available. The bottom line here, is that the DW5000U comes with a very good warranty, and support package, out of the box.

Panasonic should have tremendous success with the PT-DW5000U. They have taken their very successful PT-D5500U (just recently upgraded to the PT-D5600U) commercial projector, and created a widescreen version.

The two projectors share virtually every feature, except that the D5500U/D5600U is a standard XGA resolution projector while the PT-DW5000U is a 1280x720 widescreen model. In addition, there is a slight difference in brightness, with the XGA projector rated at 5000 lumens compared to the DW5000U being rated at 4500 lumens.

Our image quality analysis shows this Panasonic projector to actually meet it's brightness claims. Even more importantly it does a very impressive job in terms of color handling, with especially good handling of the tough colors for DLP projectors - bright reds and yellows. True, the yellows have a definite greenish caste in it's brightest (Dynamic) mode. In other modes, such as Standard, where you give up some brightness, the reds and yellows get even better.

As a true commercial projector, this is a heavy duty contender capable of 24/7 operation, and even being able to go almost a full year on one set of lamps. A liquid cooling systemwill allow the projector to even operate in 110 degree temperatures.

And it will tie into networks allowing IT to even control up to 65 of them (or other D series models) simultaneously, or one at a time, from a remote location. If there is a problem with it, it will send an email over the network to notify those designated.

When it comes to placement flexibility, you can get it with a standard lens, or without (the UL version) and choose from a total of 6 different lenses. Not impressed yet, the projector has horizontal and vertical lens shift so you can stack more than one projector vertically, or horizontally to double total brightness.

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There is competition for the DW5000U, but very little. If you are looking for a widescreen with dual lamps, Sanyo has their WF10 (List $12,995) , but it can't match the operational flexibility (such as the long life lamps or wide temperature range). In addition there are a couple from Christie and one from Projectiondesign. There are also the 3 chip DLP widescreen projectors but since they start at over double the price, they aren't exactly competition.

The list of capabilities goes on, and on, so I might as well get to the Pros and Cons before I end up mentioning everything twice.