Laser Projection Adds Rec 2020 And Built In Playback

Panasonic used BLINK, the public art festival that ran across Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky from 8 to 11 October, to put a new projector in front of an audience rather than a trade-show crowd. The company confirmed on 15 October that it had again supplied the festival's projection technology, powering thirteen sites with thirty-seven PT-RQ45K units across five locations, including twelve at Cincinnati Music Hall, and six PT-RQ25K projectors on Covenant First Presbyterian Church. Four of the new PT-HTQ20 models made their public debut on The Letter from Martha, a mural reworked by projection mapping. The festival itself ran more than thirty city blocks with ninety-two artists from twenty countries, which is a useful stress test: outdoor ambient light, brick and stone surfaces, and content that has to hold up for four nights.

The PT-HTQ20 matters because of what it claims about colour. Panasonic describes it as its first projector to support the Rec. 2020 colour gamut, achieved with a new RGB laser light source it calls VIVID PRIME, and claims almost twice the colour of the previous single-chip DLP model. For architectural mapping that is a more meaningful step than another thousand lumens. Projected colour is limited by the surface it lands on, but the gap between a narrow and a wide gamut source is visible on saturated washes, on skin tones, and on anything that has to match an LED wall next to it. RGB laser also removes the colour or phosphor wheel from the light path, so there are no segments trading brightness against colour, and the white point stays stable as the projector dims.

The second change is less visible and arguably more consequential. HIVE Media Control supplied Beeblade Pluto media engines that sit inside the PT-HTQ20 on an Intel Smart Display Module slot, playing back the mural content with frame synchronisation across units through HIVE's Beesync software and browser-based control. The practical effect is that a media server disappears from the rack. Fewer boxes means fewer power feeds, fewer failure points and one less device to keep in sync at a site where nobody wants to climb a scaffold at 7pm. It also changes the upgrade path: an SDM slot lets an integrator replace the player without replacing the projector, or the projector without orphaning the playback platform. The trade-off is lock-in to one module ecosystem, so the slot standard and the module roadmap are worth asking about before the specification is signed.

The market data explains why manufacturers are pushing at this end. RUNTO figures put global projector shipments at 19.2 million units in 2025, down 4.8 per cent, with 2026 forecast at 17.4 million. Laser projection moved the other way, from 2.31 million units in 2025 to a forecast 2.41 million in 2026, with home product taking roughly two thirds and commercial volume flat at around 800,000 units. In a shrinking market, laser is where the value is, and colour volume plus embedded playback are the differentiators being sold. For a fixed installation the questions are now: what percentage of Rec. 2020 is actually covered, what is the light-source life at the brightness the show needs, is there an SDM or equivalent expansion slot, and does the content pipeline exist to feed a wide-gamut projector. Amtune supplies the routing and transport around that projector rather than the projector itself: seamless hybrid matrix switchers, multi-view and seamless processing, AV extenders for long projector runs and signal converters for mixed source rooms. Details at sales@amtune.com.