The Perfect Vision
Panasonic PT-AE1000U Additional Notes and Technical Ratings
Under the Hood | Adjustment Notes | Test Discs | Technical Ratings
Under the Hood
Among the most interesting and useful technical features offered by the Panasonic PT-AE1000U is an integrated waveform monitor, which I've never seen on any other projector. This lets you see exactly what the image is doing in terms of luminance levels in the black-and-white (Y) channel as well as the red, green, and blue channels. It also lets you look at single lines or the entire screen in each of the aforementioned channels. All of this is very helpful when adjusting the brightness and contrast settings.
Another cool tech feature is the inclusion of three gamma controls for the low, mid, and high ranges of brightness. Increasing the Gamma Low setting helped improve shadow detail.
One feature of dubious value is Color Management, which lets you tweak specific colors on the screen. You put a cursor on the point whose color you want to adjust, and you can change the saturation, tint, and brightness of that color. Up to eight different colors can be saved in one of three user memories. However, I don't recommend trying this unless you have some tech chops—it's way too easy to screw things up.
Adjustment Notes
As I was setting up the projector, I discovered that the horizontal and vertical positions of the image from the AccuPel signal generator were way off when the position controls were set to 0; I had to offset them significantly to see all the image at the HDMI input, and even then, there seemed to be no way to avoid cropping one pixel from the top or bottom of the image. Surprisingly, the HDMI signal from the HD DVD player required that the position controls be set to 0 in order to see the entire image. I've never seen this type of discrepancy before.
The Color1 picture mode is described as reproducing the HD color space, and the primaries are relatively close to the mark. However, none of the picture modes reproduced an accurate, linear grayscale in conjunction with any setting of the color-temperature control; the best grayscale I could obtain with these controls was distinctly green in the low end. The user menu provides a complete set of grayscale calibration controls, and I recommend that owners of this projector hire a trained technician to calibrate the grayscale.
The best focus I could obtain was not as sharp as other projectors in this survey; I could not discern individual pixels from a couple of inches away. This is undoubtedly due to Panasonic's Smooth Screen technology. Peak white level was not as high as I'd like; it could probably be increased by switching the lamp mode from Eco to Normal, but that would also bring up the black level, which is already higher than other projectors in this survey.
Test Discs
On the HQV Benchmark DVD, detail was okay, but not quite as sharp as I've seen on other displays. Jaggies were very mild on the moving bars, but the waving flag didn't fare so well, with mild to moderate jaggies at the boundaries between red and white stripes. The NR (noise reduction) control cleaned up random noise a little, but not all that much, and the MPEG NR control seemed to do nothing at all. The projector's processor picked up 3:2 pulldown quickly at 480i.
Switching to the HQV Benchmark HD DVD, the video resolution loss test looked excellent, with no flickering. The film resolution loss test also looked very good, though there was a bit of flickering in the horizontal bursts. The pan across the bleachers looked fine with no artifacts, and jaggies were non-existent.
Microsoft engineer Stacey Spears' test HD DVD confirmed that setting overscan to 0 maps 1920x1080 signals onto the projector's pixels in a 1:1 relationship. The processor picked up 3:2 pulldown at 1080i quickly and reliably. There was some shimmering in the gently curved yellow trim on the sailboat, but the main montage of clips looked fine.
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