Designed primarily for business use—and with a generous helping of technical wizardry—the Panasonic PT-RZ370U ($5,899) is one of the most impressive projectors we've ever seen. It's part of Panasonic's Solid Shine Series, which means it uses a laser-LED hybrid light source paired with a DLP chip. However, it doesn't show the rainbow artifacts (red-green-blue flashes), that are always a concern for DLP projectors. That—plus the fact that it's widely avalable on the Web for far less than its list price, at less than $3,000 in some cases—helps make it our new Editors' Choice high-resolution business projector, and even a reasonable choice for a home theater.

The PT-RZ370U offers a native 1080p (1,920-by-1,080) resolution, making it a step up from the SXGA+ (1,400-by-1,050) Canon REALiS SX80 Mark II. It doesn't offer the same level of color management as the Canon model, but for most applications that need to show fine detail, the higher resolution is more useful.

Compared with most 1080p business projectors, the RZ370U also shares an advantage with the Canon model of being free of rainbow artifacts. Most of the competition, including the NEC Display Solutions NP-PE401H, for example, are single-chip DLP projectors that show red-green-blue flashes at least occasionally.

Technical Wizardry

Rainbow artifacts crop up with single-chip DLP models because the projectors show their primary colors in sequence. They leave it to the human visual system to integrate the colors over time and produce all the colors that you see. The problem is that if an object moves on screen, or you shift your gaze, the different colors can fall on different parts of the retina, so bright areas break up into little rainbows.

Standard DLP projectors, which use color wheels spinning in front of a white light, can minimize rainbow artifacts by spinning the wheel faster, with speeds given in multiples of a 1x wheel. A 6x wheel, for example, is rotating through the colors six times as fast as a 1x wheel, so the artifacts show less often. However, anyone who sees the rainbow effect easily will still see it with any standard DLP projector.

The PT-RZ370U leaves out the color wheel and switches each color source on and off instead, going though the color sequence at a 30x speed. There might conceivably be people who will see the artifacts even at 30x, but I see them easily, and didn't see any with the RZ370U, even with screens that are designed to bring them out. If the projector isn't 100-percent rainbow-free for everyone, the rainbows certainly won't show often enough to be bothersome.

According to Panasonic, the projector includes sensors to detect changes in the primary colors as the light source ages over its 20,000-hour rated lifetime. It then automatically compensates for the changes to maintain the same color balance.

Also very much worth mention is Panasonic's Digital Link Technology, which lets you connect all of your image and audio sources to an optional Digital Interface Box ($1,999) and then connect the box to the projector with a single network cable as long as 328 feet. You can also control the projector over the same connection. Not having to run multiple cables can be a welcome convenience in many situations.

One feature missing from the PT-RZ370U is 3D support. This shouldn't be an issue for most applications, but if you need 3D, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Basics and Setup

Given that it weighs 24 pounds 5 ounces, and measures 5.4 by 17.9 by 16.3 inches (HWD), the PT-RZ370U is obviously meant for permanent installation. Its cooling system will work in any orientation, so in addition to mounting it horizontally facing a wall, you can mount it facing up at a ceiling, down at a table, or at any orientation in between. You can also mount it to show images in Portrait mode, with what would normally be the top of the image on one side.

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In fact, you can mount the projector at any angle over 360 degrees in pitch, roll, and yaw. This flexibility for orientation, along with the ability to run the projector 24 hours a day for its entire lifetime, makes it a good choice for a display in a lobby or in a retail store window.

Setup is mostly standard fare, with a manual focus and manual 2x zoom. In addition, the projector offers both vertical and horizontal lens shift, which lets you move the image without moving the projector. According to Panasonic, you can shift the image by about 60 percent of the screen width from its leftmost to rightmost position, and by 120 percent of the screen height from its lowest to highest position. My measurements matched the claim for the horizontal shift, but came out a bit lower— at just over 100 percent—for the vertical shift.

Image inputs for the PT-RZ370U are limited to one HDMI port, one DVI-I port, a VGA port for a computer or component video, a composite video port, and a network port. Notably missing is a USB Type A port for reading files directly from USB memory.

Brightness

Strictly as a point of reference, using Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, and assuming a 1.0 gain screen, the 3,500-lumen rating for the PT-RZ370U would make it bright enough for a roughly 230- to 310-inch (diagonal) image in theater-dark lighting. In moderate ambient light, the appropriate size drops to roughly 150 to 170 inches. For smaller image sizes, you can lower the brightness by taking advantage of Eco mode for the lamp, using preset modes with lower brightness levels, or both.

As with almost all DLP projectors, the RZ370U's color brightness is lower than its white brightness, which means color images won't be as bright as you would expect from the white brightness level. (For more on color brightness, see Color Brightness: What It Is, Why It Matters.)

Image Quality

Quality for data images is excellent. The PT-RZ370U handled our standard suite of DisplayMate tests with no problems worth mention. Colors were vibrant, eye-catching and fully saturated in all preset modes in our testing, and the projector also handles detail well. Both white text on black, and black text on white, for example, are highly readable at 6.8 points.

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Video quality is just short of excellent. I saw a moderate level of noise in dark areas in one clip that tends to show noise, and a mild loss of shadow detail (details based on shading in dark areas) in another particularly demanding clip, but no serious issues.

In fact, you could easily use the RZ370U in a home theater. It lacks the more sophisticated image processing features that you'll find in similarly priced projectors specifically designed for home theater—including frame interpolation, for example, to make movement smoother—but it delivers a better-looking image than any number of less expensive home theater and home entertainment projectors.

Although the RZ370U offers a stereo input and output,it doesn't include a built-in speaker. If you need sound, you'll need an external audio system.

If you must have 3D, consider the NEC Display Solutions NP-PE401H. And if you have a critical need to get colors just so, the Canon SX80 Mark II is still the obvious choice, because of its excellent color management. If you don't need either, however, the Panasonic PT-RZ370U will give you a high-quality, rainbow-free image, convenience features like lens shift, and an assortment of extras, from the option to connect with a single cable to being able to mount it in any orientation. The combination makes the PT-RZ370U an impressive beast indeed, and our Editors' Choice high-resolution business projector.