Last week I flew to Sydney to attend the Panasonic Australia Project the Future launch of their new range of projectors now that they have merged with Sanyo. There were more than 150 customers and dealers from all over Australia (according to the press release) and quite a few were from Queensland.

When we arrived at the event, the doors were opened and we walked into the room through a fog screen – that made it a grand entrance – then you were in projector heaven. I counted over 21 models on display (not all of those were powered up).

There was the flagship “compact” PT-DZ21K 3-chip DLP WUXGA with an amazing 20,000 lumens — it is claimed to be the smallest, lightest 20,000 lumen model on the market so far. This 20K projector weighs in at an average weight of 43kg (94.8lbs), I thought the image was amazing, very sharp and vibrant.

I was also impressed with the two PT-DZ110XE 10,600 lumen projectors, which were image-blended and projected onto a large curved screen. After staring at it for a while I could not find fault, great picture – and they assured me it is easy to set up.

Also there were some boardroom models that included lens shift & 10W Speaker (ex-Sanyo models — now with the Panasonic badge and new model numbers). Some of these projectors connect wirelessly to iPhones and iPads.

I was impressed overall as I’d not had a lot of exposure to (formerly) Sanyo models in the past and I was very tempted to pick up the remote and have a play – could you just imagine me bringing up the menu, stuffing up the show? I wouldn’t have been very popular. I’ll have to get my sales rep to bring a couple over so that we can “kick the tyres so to speak,” and then I would be able to see what they are really capable of.

I really enjoyed meeting other people that have similar businesses to mine and comparing how we operate. I also enjoyed speaking to distributors and people from the audio visual departments at some of the universities. It was a great opportunity to chat with the product managers at Panasonic — made easier over beer and wine. I spent quite a bit of time explaining Twitter and social media tools to one of the Panasonic marketing guys. I really found it amazing how many people in the industry knew very little about social media.

So overall Panasonic put on a very good display of their newly combined models making it clear that they wanted to be a force in business projectors in Australia – let’s hope that they follow through with what they promised.