Panasonic PT-AR100U Pro Reviews

Extremely bright and ideal for the family room type environment, the PT-AR100U offers extensive placement flexibility, especially compared to most of the similarly priced competition. Choose your color modes for your content and tastes (and brightness). The projector itself, physically looks good - a mid-sized home projector. Its remote control is great, and the menus are well designed. The memory area lets you save settings, as we propose you do on our Calibration page. The projector has a waveform generator for those so inclined to use it. Overall, there are a few downsides, mostly due to the PT-AR100U being so bright. Fan noise is a little louder than most, and lamp life is below average. I recently made the same comment about BenQ's W7000 a favorite $2500 range projector, which is about equally bright, just in a higher quality and price class. Considering you can run this projector in eco-mode where the lamp hours aren't bad, prevents this from being a signficant issue. About the only thing missing is Creative Frame Interpolation - aka smooth motion, which sadly, is pretty much absent when it comes to projectors in this price range. Lack of CFI is not a big thing, even at best, but it's nice to have the option. The Detail Clarity control let's you enhance sharpness (don't overdo it - noise will also become more noticeable). The bottom line, is that for general purpose, 2D only, full-HD resolution home entertainment projectors, the PT-AR100U is about as good as it gets these days for under $1000.

The Panasonic PT-AR100U is a strong multi-purpose projector that's ideal for the ambient light of a typical living room. Following in the tradition of the AX100 and AX200 models from several years ago, the AR100U makes some improvements to the Light Harmonizer feature that sets these projectors apart from other home entertainment models. With the Light Harmonizer, you won't even need to change image modes, especially if you're using a preset like Vivid Cinema, which combines high brightness with accurate color. In a classic home theater situation, where ambient light is not a factor, the projector's less than solid black level becomes more noticeable and digital noise can be distracting. When compared to the Epson Home Cinema 8350, it becomes clear that Panasonic made some compromises in order to design a better home entertainment projector, and these compromises make it less effective as a home theater projector--though not by much. The bottom line is this: if you want a projector that performs in the living room, whether that be for games, or sports, or just television, the AR100U is about as good as it gets. The fact that it can multi-task as a home theater projector is a bonus, and a good one, but its faults in that area in no way take away from its performance in its intended niche.