I had a demo unit of the PT-RZ370 (as well as some other conventional Panasonic units). The PZ370 is large, relatively heavy and the 'futuristic' shape looks even more so in real life. Personally, I like business-looking devices. Nice square boxes
Image was great. Extremely sharp with a good throw. The optical adjustments looked and felt top notch. We are retrofitting rooms, so having the wide throw and lens shift options on the optical side of things are nice. It could have been a bit brighter. don't think they are lying about the 3k lumen (some *other* manf. had suggested that Panasonic was fudging the brightness and life numbers by a lot). It was certainly brighter than the 2500k lumen we had in the room already but not as bright as the 570 (normal lamp, LCD, 5k) they also sent us.
The PT-RZ370 was pretty much instant-on. I think it's 'booting' up more than it's firing up the optics. About 4 seconds from on to input sync and your image on the screen. Pulled the power, plugged it back in and it came up in the same 4 seconds. Motion was good (Pixar movie) - image was a bit ruddy, but we tweaked the image settings a bit and it evened out. If the 10 years/20,000 hours claim pans out and the HDBaseT component eliminates additional control gear (Crestron in our case) at the pole then its probably a winner for schools and businesses that have good control over the ambient light.
being an early adopter has bit us before, so not sure if we want to jump in head first and go down that path or not. FWIW, we were quoted a little under $3k per unit. alternatives (for us) are in that range but we would need crestron control units to fully enable them for our needs. If they were 4k lumen and could guarantee 15k hours they would have a winner, imho.
