May 2006 Reviewed by Jeff Van Dyne	Panasonic PT-AE900U LCD Projector

Description Model: PT-AE900U Price: $3199 USD Dimensions: 13.2"W x 3.7"H x 10.6"D Weight: 7.9 pounds Warranty: One year parts and labor	Features Three Epson D5 LCD panels 1280x720 resolution 5500:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio 1100 ANSI lumens brightness Automatic iris for improved contrast and black levels Smooth Screen technology to eliminate screen-door effect Cinema Color Management technology Vertical and horizontal lens shift 2.0x optical zoom lens Six selectable video inputs Front, rear, ceiling modes

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: Size matters. That 27" TV you’ve been watching for the past ten years is inadequate. If you doubt this, consider that the optimal viewing distance recommended by THX is 1.5 times the width of a widescreen picture. A 27" TV is 22" wide, which makes the THX viewing distance 33". How far away are you sitting?

If you really want that all-out theater experience, the average flat panel won’t quite get you there. If you sit 10’ from the screen, it would take four 46" flat panels to fill the space required to meet the THX specification. A 72" DLP rear-projection TV will set you back five grand and still come up well short of the 92" diagonal the spec calls for at this distance. A few years down the road things may change, but if you want a really big picture at something less than the cost of a car, you’re going to be looking at projectors.

The first thing to understand is that projectors are not for everyone. For one thing, projectors make lousy TVs. Blowing up a low-resolution digital cable or satellite feed to 92" or larger will make it look fuzzy, at best. This, too, will change as more high-definition programming becomes available, but as of now, most programming doesn’t cut it when projected onto a large screen.

Another issue is that projector lamps typically cost more than $300 each and last only 2000 to 3000 hours. If your household is like the many that use a projector as their primary source of television, that means you’ll need to replace the lamp once or twice a year.

Finally, because a relatively small amount of light can significantly wash out a projected image, a projector needs to be in a light-controlled space. Unless you like living in a cave, you’ll want something else for daytime viewing. Still, projectors are currently the only technology that can provide an 8’-diagonal or larger picture for an entry fee of around $2000.

Sizing things up

The Panasonic PT-AE900U ($3199) is the latest in a series of LCD projectors produced for the home-theater market. Panasonic’s last generation, the PT-AE700, broke new ground with a number of features that quickly made it the best-selling LCD projector in the world, and no wonder -- its extensive lens-shift capabilities and long zoom lens allowed it to be placed just about anywhere in the room with no serious degradation of picture quality. The PT-AE900U is a significant but incremental improvement over the PT-AE700.

Lens shift, commonly found in LCD projectors but rare with mid-priced DLP projectors, allows you to shift the image’s position on the screen up or down and to the left or right. Also, most DLP projectors have a picture offset that places the top of the picture 10-15" below the lens of a ceiling-mounted projector. If, like me, you have a low ceiling, this eliminates a huge chunk of the sub-$3000 projector market from consideration.

Another unusual feature of the PT-AE900U is its 2.0x zoom lens, instead of the more common 1.2x or 1.3x lens. This permits a much greater range of placement possibilities. For example, filling a 100"-diagonal screen with a 1.2x zoom lens might require you to place the projector 11’ to 13’ from the screen. The Panasonic’s 2.0x zoom allows it to be placed anywhere from 10’ to 20’ away from the same size screen. These two factors will resolve all but the most difficult installation issues. They also allow the PT-AE900U to be mounted on a shelf at the back of the room, which will further reduce installation cost and complexity.

The big drawbacks of the LCD technology are poor contrast ratio, insufficient black levels, and the screen-door effect. In addressing the first two, Panasonic has resorted to some technical trickery to increase the perceived contrast and black levels beyond what the LCD technology is, at present, technically capable of. It works by judging the light levels in various parts of the picture and adjusting the iris opening and lamp output 60 times per second to produce the best possible combination of black levels and contrast. While the PT-AE900U’s actual contrast is nowhere near the 5500:1 claimed, its perceived contrast is quite high.

The screen-door effect is the apparent grid created by the black spaces between the pixels, which produces the impression that you’re watching the picture through a screen door. I’m particularly susceptible; I can see pixel structure from farther away than most, even with the better DLP projectors. To address the screen-door effect, Panasonic has come up with Smooth Screen technology, which smooths the transition between pixels, virtually eliminating any visible pixel structure when viewed from any reasonable distance. Some people complain that Smooth Screen makes the picture less sharp, but I see little difference with HD material (more on this below).

Setting up a projector is never a piece of cake, but the PT-AE900U’s lens shift and 2.0x zoom lens go a long way toward making the job as simple as possible. Some have complained that the lens shift’s joystick control is finicky. I found it a bit touchy, but once it’s adjusted, you shouldn’t have to fiddle with it again. If you mount the PT-AE900U on the ceiling, the biggest issues will likely be getting the mount aligned properly and running the cables to the projector. I use a Chief universal mount, which is very well made and thought out and easily worth the extra cost over a cheaper mount.

With the PT-AE900U’s image positioned on the screen, it was now time to calibrate the picture for best color, contrast, etc. Using Cinema1 mode projected on a plain white screen, the PT-AE900U’s colors were pretty accurate right out of the box, though a little on the green/yellow side of neutral. After a basic setup with the AVIA test DVD, I compared the Panasonic to my ISF-calibrated Hitachi 46F500 HDTV rear projector. I rate the PT-AE900U’s color accuracy to be at least the Hitachi’s equal. I then improved the PT-AE900U’s performance with some additional tweaking. (A good place to start would be the PT-AE900U tweak thread on the AVS Forum, though the settings listed there depend somewhat on which screen you use.)

The noise from ventilation fans has been an annoyance with projectors from the start, though these have gotten quieter in recent years. The Panasonic’s fan was very quiet when I placed the projector on a table, louder when I hung it from the ceiling. This was because the fan runs faster to counteract the higher temperatures found near a room’s ceiling. Though I never found the noise particularly objectionable, I could hear it during all but a film’s loudest sequences.

In terms of connection options, there’s little to be concerned about. There are two sets of component inputs, an HDMI connection, a VGA connector to plug a computer into, and one each of S-video and composite connections. There are no trigger inputs or outputs, which can be useful for controlling electrically powered screens. Also, there is only one remote eye, on the projector’s front. A second eye, on the rear, would have been useful: a remote emitter could have been mounted to it so that a remote control’s commands could reliably control the projector without the user having to turn the remote around toward the front of the projector. One thing that baffles me is why Panasonic didn’t use a standard IEC connector for the power cord. Their proprietary connection precludes the use of any custom aftermarket or short DIY power cords. It looks as if I’ll be cutting down Panasonic’s stock cord so I’m not left with 5’ of cord coiled behind the projector.

Now, that’s a really big . . .

. . . Kong. Watching Peter Jackson’s King Kong as projected by the PT-AE900U, one of the first things I noticed was that the close-ups of Kong and Naomi Watts were very sharp while showing no hint of pixel structure. This was Panasonic’s Smooth Screen technology coming into play -- I generally see some pixel structure when sitting 10’ away from my 92" screen. But with the PT-AE900U, I didn’t begin to see pixel structure until I was about 5’ from the screen. Some people complain that Smooth Screen softens the picture, but after examining the images thrown by the Panasonic and some competing LCD projectors, I tend to think that the more defined pixel structure of those other makes was responsible for adding some artificial sharpness that isn’t there in the source material. If Smooth Screen softened the picture, then this softening would also have been evident with true HD material, and that was anything but the case. The PT-AE900U’s perceived contrast was very good. In King Kong, the texture of Hayes’ black coat was plainly visible in the scene where he speaks to Jimmy about getting an education.

Another occasional issue with LCD projectors has been vertical banding. This manifests itself as faint vertical lines in bright, evenly lit scenes, such as the blue background of the ocean in Finding Nemo. Vertical banding can be quite distracting, but I’m happy to report there was never a hint of it with the PT-AE900U, and probably isn’t with the vast majority of the latest generation of LCD projectors. However, recognizing that vertical banding may still be a problem with some individual units, Panasonic has provided flicker and panel adjustment options in the PT-AE900U’s service menu, and appears to be handling any other vertical-banding problems as warranty issues.

The PT-AE900U’s internal scaler left a lot to be desired. Feed it a 480i signal from the component outputs of your average DVD player and you’ll likely be disappointed by a uniformly soft picture. During the course of this review I used as sources the Panasonic DVD-S97 and Oppo 971H DVD players, both of which offer conversion to the Panasonic’s native 720p resolution. The results were far superior to the projector’s internal processor. Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith revealed a significantly softer picture from the component outputs of the Panasonic DVD-S97 than did the same player’s 720p HDMI output. The moral: If you’re considering buying a PT-AE900U, pad your budget with another $200 to buy a topnotch scaling DVD player. I highly recommend either of the two mentioned here.

During uniformly dark sequences, such as the opening scene of Revenge of the Sith, the PT-AE900U’s black levels were very good, though they didn’t quite approach my Hitachi RPTV’s deep inkiness. Where the Panasonic’s automatic iris faltered somewhat was in sequences where there are large blocks of dark and light in the same frame, such as when General Grievous’ ship arrives at Utapau. This was evident as crushed black levels, which resulted in fewer and dimmer stars visible in the background. Nobody would notice without making direct comparisons, but most DLP projectors handle this scene somewhat better.

Those who think the PT-AE900U’s images from DVDs are soft need to watch the quarter scene from Driven. I hate this movie, but it’s one of the better DVD transfers out there. Once the projector was properly set up and fed a signal from a good DVD player, any hint of softness was the fault of the source material, not the projector. With the Panasonic fed a digital signal via the Oppo’s DVI output, this scene was razor-sharp and looked nearly like HD -- so sharp that I began to wonder if the limitations of DVD images on large screens are due less to the format’s inherent lack of resolution than to the very poor mastering of most DVDs. That’s not to say that HD still isn’t drastically superior to DVD. But if HD DVD and Blu-ray masterings turn out to be as poor as a lot of DVDs, we won’t see much improvement from the new formats.

However, where the PT-AE900U really shone was with true high-definition material, such as that found on the Discovery Channel’s Equator and Insectia shows. Any doubts I might have had about the sharpness of the Panasonic’s picture were resolved in the blink of an eye. HD material was as sharp through the PT-AE900U as through any other projector I’ve seen. If Smooth Screen was softening the picture, it would have been evident on HD broadcasts, and it wasn’t. I’ve spent the last few years marveling at the resolution and lifelike appearance of HD on my 46" Hitachi RPTV, but even that hadn’t prepared me for what HD could look like on a 92" screen. The image was so detailed and lifelike that I found it hard to imagine how the picture could get much better. There was something disturbing about seeing a 70" cockroach crawl across the wall 10’ from my seat.

The big finish

The Panasonic PT-AE900U gives the home-theater owner who wants a lot of installation flexibility a level of performance previously associated only with midrange DLP units. I continue to be amazed at the detail, depth, and color fidelity of the PT-AE900U’s images -- not to mention their size.

I’d argue that the PT-AE900U’s list price of $3199 is too high, but no one will be paying list. Retail prices are always subject to change, but, as of this writing, the PT-AE900U’s street price has dropped to about $1900, with Panasonic offering an additional $400 rebate. At $1900, the PT-AE900U is a good deal; at $1500, it’s an amazing deal. Never before has this combination of performance and flexibility been available at anywhere near this price.

Manufacturer contact information:

Panasonic
1 Panasonic Way, Suite 4E-7
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 348-5300

Website: www.panasonic.com/projectors

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