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(More customer reviews)The Panasonic AE4000U 3-LCD video projector is the second projector I have owned and the 4th I have used more than once or twice. After four and a half years of using my old Panasonic L300U video projector, I bought this new projector plus a Blu-Ray player.
The old projector looked great on high definition TV broadcasts and very good on DVDs as long as they were brightly lit and colorful. High-def Football and other sports looked fabulous projected onto my 64 inch beaded glass screen, even when the room wasn't really dark and even though it wasn't really a true high definition projector. 1080i and 720p downrezed to my 1/4HD projector's native 540p (540x960) looked great and much better than DVD's native 480P. And with my eyeballs 11-12 feet from the screen or even 9 feet, I could not see pixels, and more pixels and detail would actually probably not have been visible (I thought). But I don't watch much sports and mostly use it for movies and high def TV. The major problem it had was with black levels. In black and white or color programs where there was very little black ever in the image there was no problem. In film noir, or Orson Welles films, or even the Buffy or Angel TV shows which have lots of dark and night scenes, the absence of black was a quite annoying problem. And my major criteria for a new projector were that it have black levels that actually look black, that it display 1080p signals, and also that it be able to display 24 frame per second (movie) signals at 24 fps. Other information I can get from reviews, but to see if black levels were good enough for ME, I had to see it. Unfortunately, stores basically don't have display models so it is hard to actually SEE what a picture looks like, as I found out when I took my copies of Citizen Kane and Star Wars episode II out to try to see some. Only a local high end dealer had a $6000 DLP projector which was very good but way out of my price range.
Finally I found an online dealer which had a return policy that would have allowed me to return a projector for my money back if I didn't like it and had put less than four hours on the lamp. Among others, they had the Panasonic AE4000U, which sounded very promising based on reviews and I already had a Panasonic which, with certain reservations, I liked a lot. So I ordered it. The black levels weren't perfect but they were VERY impressive, as good, I thought, as the $6000 DLP I had seen. I projected a little bit of my Blu-ray Blade Runner and my wife saw a little of it and commented that it looked beautiful even thought she doesn't like the movie. After an hour or so of making adjustments and checking out some video material, but not directly comparing it to the old projector, I was pretty sure it was good enough and wanted to keep it and set up a test to show my wife, and myself. I covered the right half of the new projector lens and the left half of the old projector lens and in normal bright room light adjusted the pictures to the same size and to a smooth transition between sides when both projectors were being fed the same signal. Then I darkened the room, invited my wife in for a comparison of the old and new without yet knowing myself how they would look side by side in the dark and brought up a few scenes from the Star Wars episode II DVD.
Between the OPPO Blu-ray player feeding a better quality signal via HDMI (vs component for the older projector) and the quality difference between the 6 year old projector and the new one, the difference was astonishing in terms of black level, color quality, brightness (in eco mode, yet), sharpness, you name it. It took my wife less than 30 seconds to say that we were keeping the new projector; not only that, but the Blu-ray player, about which she had been quite dubious, was indeed, she now agreed, also a worthwhile purchase. We shut the old projector off, removed the lens covering, and looked at more of Star Wars, some of Citizen Kane, and on Blu-ray, a bit of Blade Runner and a couple other odds and ends. We both came away very happy. The colors are much more natural and beautiful and the increase in detail is amazing.
In isolation, the old projector still looks very good, except for black levels. But I am a little surprised at how much sharper the new one looks from 11-12 feet away. I think a good bit of it has to do with the improvement in apparent sharpness due to the better black level performance. There are 4 times as many pixels, but from 12 feet away, lots of extra pixels just aren't really visible, though the increase in pixels undoubtedly gets extra information to your brain even though you don't consciously see an increase. With the old projector, from 5 feet away, I could see pixels on on the 64 inch (diagonal) screen. From less than a foot away, I still can't see pixels with the AE4000U except sometimes on some test patterns, but not on any program material. It is like looking at film and very sharp even when viewed up close.
A few days later, thinking about the very good but not perfect black levels, it struck me that film doesn't have perfect blacks either. The black levels with the projector aren't as good as the blacks on my old ProScan 27" CRT. But the blacks with this projector seem to me to be as good as I have ever seen in any color film with the possible exception of some--not all--3-Strip Technicolor(tm) IB prints and as good as any black and white film I have seen in a print less than 50 years old. This projector is mostly for viewing film. So that is good enough.
I went to see the Princess and the Frog with the family when it was out and the theatre just didn't put enough light up on the screen which seriously degraded the experience. While the end credits were rolling, white text on a black screen, I walked up to the front and put my hand in front of the screen and could see my shadow clearly in the black. If they had been using adequate light it would have been even clearer. Images are much brighter at home and the shadows aren't much different.
My default setting for all things video is now 1080p60, with 24fps enabled on my Oppo BDP-83SE. Fed to the AE4000U projected onto a 64 inch diagonal 9x16 screen, excellent DVD material, like Star Wars, episode II (specifically scene 15 Return to Naboo, which I have used as a test scene), really does look near HD. It isn't as sharp as Blu-ray or 1080i or 720p broadcast, but it really does look very good, enough so that I am not highly motivated to replace many DVDs with Blu-ray discs. I may change my mind when I get a 92 inch screen, but having stood up close to the screen and compared Blu-ray and DVD upscaled and at 24fps with the Oppo Blu-ray player (BDP-83SE, which I have also reviewed) and the AE4000U, I suspect that I won't. I should also note that viewed on other upscaling DVD players, DVDs don't look as good as they do on Oppo BDP-83 or BDP-83SE. Make no mistake, Blu-ray looks better, but with this system, Blu-ray's biggest advantage is high definition sound instead of Dolby Digital's lossy compression. I do plan to buy most new discs in Blu-ray, but I don't plan to replace many old ones unless for its for soundtrack upgrades. That said, I did upgrade North By Northwest, with its wonderful Bernard Herrmann score, and there are a handful of others I would jump at the opportunity to buy on Blu-ray for a sound upgrade.
I also show virtually everything I watch with dynamic iris off and at the standard Cinema 1 setting for 6500K color temperature (for black and white or color), and I find that in general the color is gorgeous and very evocative of the experience of viewing movies in a good theatre where the management is really dedicated to a quality viewing experience (an attitude that is all too rare in movie theatres). And DVDs from Technicolor(tm) original sources, like the classic Warner Brothers Adventures of Robin Hood, really do approximate the experience of 3-Strip Technicolor(tm) Nitrate originals. So movies at my house often look better than in theatres.
I think that having a player capable of outputting 24fps is very important and significantly upgrades the experience watching film based material. Some recommend it only for Blu-ray and "very well authored DVDs." I use it on all DVDs and and infrequently (not at all on many movies and, usually not more than 1-4 times per movie) I get a black frame at 24fps. I suspect this occurs when the player or projector looses cadence momentarily because of an improper edit point on the DVD. But the overall increase in how realistic movies look is well worth an occasional black frame.
If the room is brightly lit and what I have on is ordinary TV that I am not much interested in, I will occasionally use the Dynamic setting, which throws more apparent light on the screen, instead of Cinema 1. But if it is something I care about, I'll darken the room and watch it in Cinema 1.
This is an excellent projector. Buying this and and Oppo BDP 83 together at list price is an incredible bargain and will keep you happy watching and listening to movies on DVD and Blu-ray for a long time. And over-the-air high definition broadcasts in 720p or 1080i both look better than upscaled DVD.
Update 6-29-10:
For a while I have been conscious of this but I thought I would write it up fresh tonight. I just watched a Netflix DVD of Blindside tonight and on the Oppo using upscaling to 1080P through HDMI with 24 hz DVD playback enabled and through the Panasonic AE-4000 set to frame creation mode 1 (the least processing above no processing) on a 65 inch screen at 10 feet, I really was not conscious that I was watching a DVD rather than a Blu-ray disc. During the credits it is easier to tell, but watching the movie it is not. This is the same setup...Read more›
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