Panasonic was in the main Gitex area rather than in the Infocomm space. The first product we looked at was the ET-D75LE90 ultra-short throw lens that the company showed at Infocomm – this was the first time that this reporter had seen it. The lens is a straight fit for Panasonic’s 3 chip DLP projectors and is unusual as most companies use mirrors for their UST products. The short throw is designed to allow just the depth of the projector between the lens and the projection surface – around 1m. At this distance, it supports an image of 120″ diagonal and with plenty of brightness from the three chip unit, even though the ambient light was quite bright. We asked about pricing but staff could only say that it was “very” expensive.
Next we looked at the 55LFV70, the latest 55″ ultra-narrow bezel which was also shown at Infocomm and IBC. On the booth, staff highlighted the magnetic system being used to assist with accurate panel alignment and the special brackets that Panasonic has designed. Our attention was also drawn to the HDBaseT scaling that can support multiple screens (up to 8 with HDCP, more without). The feature could be useful in control rooms and a special facility is that there is automatic switching between dual inputs, so that if parallel wiring is used, then in the event of one signal failing, the monitor automatically switches to the second input.
In projection, the PT-RZ670 series of single chip DLP laser projectors was being highlighted. Panasonic uses three independent blue lasers with two being processed through phosphor wheels to generate red and green. Emphasis was being put on the long life of the lasers – a lifetime of 87K hours (10 years) is possible at 1,300 lumens and 20,000 hours at 6,500 lumens (but not as a continuous display. Staff told us that the images look like 8K lamp-based images, because of the high quality of the colours. The firm said that it had set the brightness at 6,500 ANSI lumens because of the requirement of rental companies and in the UK, 6 units have already been sold to Manchester based rental and staging firm AtoV. Allan Hindley, Partner at AtoV, said,
