Mar

3

High End Projector or the Panasonic PT-AE3000

Filed Under 1080p Projectors | Amazon, A Dream Home Theater | Leave a Comment 

 
Sure many or the projectors reviewed here and in several other Home Theater Forums get rave reviews and users drool over the picture quality. 

 

Typically a quality home theater projector will cost between $1,800 – $5,000.  So just imagine what a super high end projector such as the Runco VX-1c at a retail price of $17,000 would look like? The VX-1c is the most expensive single-chip DLP projector on the market today.  It should be markedly better than anything you could purchase on Amazon or Best Buy right?  Wrong, today’s mass market projectors rival and even better these ultra expensive sytems. Why?  The reason is that the digital projector revolution does not accommodate the high-end marketing/distribution infrastructure very well. LCD and DLP projectors can be produced at a fraction of the cost of CRTs. They can be marketed in larger volumes and at lower prices. They are small and simple. They can be sold on the Internet and shipped anywhere. They can be installed by the buyer, and even reasonably well calibrated by the buyer with a little attention and instruction (watch this site for calibration information—coming soon).

Meanwhile, the high-end vendors are producing digital projector products and marketing them through low-volume custom installers and high-end home theater specialty dealers as if they were finicky labor-intensive CRTs. The mark-ups (not only for Runco but for other traditional high-end brands as well) are due in large part to the expense of marketing their brands and distributing through specialty resellers. All of this leaves the uninformed consumer in a tenuous position. People will tend to believe that premium prices from high-end resellers will guarantee premium performance; such is not the case.

 The Panasonic PT-AE3000 is the latest in panasonic’s the best-selling AE home theater projector series. Has a slate of features that cannot found on projectors costing over $15,000, while providing a picture every bit as beautiful and detailed. The AE3000 improves upon the already strong list of features of the AE2000.

 With new “lens memory” which easily converts video from 16:9 widescreen format to the dramatic 2.35:1 CinemaScope aspect ratio which is commonly used in the motion picture industry. Almost all home theaters today, use 16:9 (1.78:1) aspect ratio screens. That is, of course, the correct ratio for HDTV, but still too tall, for the vast majority of movies, which have been created using Cinemascope’s aspect ratio of 2.35:1.

 For those primarily concerned with movie viewing, using that 16:9 screen means a letterbox (an almost black area, above and below the image). Both boxes are each about 10% of the screen height. Thus, you get that dark gray box. Now using a 16:9 screen makes sense, especially when you consider that the projectors, themselves are 16:9 devices.

 However, if you chose a wider screen, you would lose that letterbox (great), but the problem is, your HDTV and standard TV sources, would overshoot the top and bottom of the screen. Definitely not acceptable.

What the Panasonic does, instead, for those who choose a 2.35:1 screen, is allow the projector to use an “anamorphic” resize of the image, combined with zoom, so that you fill the full 2.35:1 screen without those pesky letterboxes. Then, when you want to watch your HDTV, etc., it simply zooms out, reducing the vertical size of the 16:9 image, to just fill the screen with content, from top to bottom. That now leaves you a letterbox on the left and right, but for those who consider movies far more important than TV, they would all prefer not to have the letterboxing on movies.

 One comment. Using a real anamorphic lens (and sled), accomplishes the same thing with some advantages, but you are normally talking about a few thousand dollars more.

 PT-AE3000 Projector Highlights:

  • Excellent brightness in both best and brightest modes (a slight improvement over the PT-AE2000U)
  • Extremely good out of the box color performance (probably the best of any consumer projector)
  • Frame rate interpolation for improved handling of fast moving objects and scenes, to reduce motion blur
  • “Pseudo” anamorphic lens features, including savable memory settings on zoom and aspect ratio – an extremely interesting feature with many benefits, which allows an owner to choose a 2.35:1 aspect ratio screen, without spending the big bucks for an anamorphic lens.
  • Power zoom and focus
  • Detail Clarity Processor 2 – Optimizes the sharpness of each image portion to reproduce fine nuances lost in image compression.
  • Waveform Monitor – Optimizes brightness output from a given video signal source.
  • Split Adjust Mode – Freeze a scene and make adjustments while comparing the original and adjusted images side-by-side. (learn more from Panasonic)
  • Max. 16-Bit Digital Processing – Faithfully reproduces even subtle hues and brightness variations.
  • Cinema Color Management – Adjust one color without affecting neighboring colors, for just the right equalization in hue, luminance and saturation.
  • New 120Hz drive processor  -Added a “frame creation” drive to fill in the gaps in fast motion, eg. where this is most visible is panning across type (the map), moving cars (the license plates), and a plane flying across the sky (or a football thrown across the field) Better still, they do the same with 24fps (movies), but actually create 3 frames between the first and second provided frames.
  • Still collaborating with Hollywood colorists at the Panasonic Hollywood Lab to fine tune the color reproduction of the projector to match the original film content.
  • Improved optical lensing; Panasonic still making their own lenses, but this time in the same factory where they produce the sophisticated lenses for the Leica and Lumix cameras.
  • Smooth Screen Technology here again
  • Same lamp as AE2000

MSRP: $3499. MAP: $2499
Technology: 3LCD
Native Resolution: 1080p (1920×1080)
Brightness:1600 lumens
Contrast: 60,000:1
Zoom Lens ratio: 2:1
Lens shift: Vertical and Horizontal
Lamp life: 3000 hours low power (eco-mode), 2000 hours at full lamp power
Weight: 16.1 lbs. (7.3 Kg)
Warranty: 1 Year Parts and Labor