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PRODUCT REVIEW: PANASONIC PT-AE500U/L500U FRONT LCD PROJECTOR |
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Front LCD projectors for home theater are practically commodity items these days – there are several models to choose from, and prices have dropped considerably as competition from single-chip DLP technology has stepped up. What’s interesting is that some of the newer models have good enough image quality for use in a production environment. I wouldn’t recommend them for serious postproduction work, but you’ll find some of these models quite handy for general purpose screening of widescreen SD and true HD content. Panasonic’s PT-AE500U/L500U is a projector that made its debut at Cedia Expo 2003 last fall. It comes equipped with three 1280x720 LCD panels and a supposedly top-notch color and gamma correction system that Panasonic developed in partnership with top Hollywood colorists.
For this review, I tested the AE500U consumer version. The differences between this model and the professional-version L500U are in the retail price and minor cosmetics – everything else remains the same. The PT-AE500U has a clean, compact design and tips the scales at just over 6 pounds. The housing is a very attractive silver color, with the lens offset to the side. The lens itself doesn’t have a very long zoom ratio – only 1.2:1 – but does incorporate some positive image offset to get most of the image above the housing. Some front LCD projectors come equipped with manual lens shift to overcome off-axis projection. Unfortunately, the PT-AE500U isn’t one of them, so if you can’t position the projector ‘square to the screen’ your only remedy for keystoned image correction is a less-desirable digital image adjustment circuit. The supplied remote control is a bit small, but has a nice layout with logical button positioning. You’ll have direct access to any input directly with this remote. Navigation through menus is accomplished with up/down and left-right arrows, plus a center ENTER key. (No mousedisk here!). As far as connectors go, you get one composite input, one S-video input, and a three-wire RCA component hookup. There’s also a 15-pin VGA jack for connection to anything from set-top receivers to your PC, as well as a DVI input jack. One thing you won’t get is on-board audio reinforcement. Neither the consumer or the professional model has it, so if you plan to set up temporary screenings of any video content, you’ll need to bring along a separate set of amplified speakers. The projector is very quiet, with fan noise specified at an amazingly low 27 dB. It won’t ‘fight’ your audio system, that’s for certain. OPERATION AND MENUS I found the menus easy to navigate. Full control is provided over all image parameters. Of particular interest are those special gamma and color channel settings. 10-bit sampling is used to produce 1024 luminance shades for red, green, and blue, which means you’ve got a heck of a lot of color shades to mix and a wider pallet than found on other LCD projectors. There’s a lot of fiddling you can do with image quality as a result, although Panasonic also provides some preset gamma/brightness/contrast/color temperature modes. These are identified as Normal, Dynamic, Video, Natural, Cinema 1, and Cinema 2. I opted to set up the projector in Normal mode before making any adjustments to gamma, contrast, and brightness. Three image adjustment and settings memories are provided, although another one or two would be handy. Five aspect ratio presets are on tap with 408i/p programs, while HD signals automatically “force” to 16x9 size. Panasonic has also developed a process to minimize the LCD screen-door effect by double refraction of images within each LCD pixel. I can’t tell you any more about this was accomplished, only to say that the screen-door effect isn’t completely gone – but it it’s not as noticeable as other LCD projectors with comparable resolution. Scroll down the image adjust menu, and you’ll find a function labeled only as ‘AI’. This is a real-time dynamic auto iris function that stops down the lens to optimize black levels and contrast. It’s adapted from Panasonic’s high-end DLP front projectors, and two settings plus ‘off’ are available. PERFORMANCE I selected Normal mode on the PT-AE500U before calibration, then used AccuPel HDG2000 and Extron VTG300 test pattern generators and a Minolta CL-200 color temperature meter to tweak the grayscale and color with 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i video sources. Test video clips came from the Video Essentials DVD and a bunch of off-air HD programs recorded to the D-VHS format. After tweaking, I measured 365 ANSI lumens in Normal mode. Brightness ranged from 645 lumens in Dynamic mode to 120 lumens in Cinema 1 mode. The projector is not terribly bright; don’t expect it to blow you away under high ambient lighting. A plain matte screen is best with this projector, although a gray screen would pull those black levels down more. Contrast performance was very good with readings of 242:1 ANSI (average) and 328:1 peak (checkerboard). Brightness uniformity on average to any corner was 55%, which isn’t anything to write home about. (The best LCD projectors can usually achieve 70% or better brightness uniformity.) Low brightness uniformity means you might see a hot spot if you used a high gain screen with the PT-AE500U. By projecting 11-step grayscale ramps and setting gamma to 2.2, then adjusting contrast and brightness for the smoothest grayscale, I was able to get very clean color out of the projector. When I dialed in a neutral white balance, the image didn’t shift excessively to magenta or cyan at high or low levels of luminance – another problem that often pops up on small LCD projectors. The end result was surprisingly good color quality. Reds and yellows (two tough colors for LCD projectors) looked natural, and didn’t show up as shades of orange and lemon colors. Overall color saturation was better than expected when compared to a Princeton AF3.0HD 32” HDTV monitor. It took some time to see the differences between its colors and the PT-AE500U’s colors. Since the PT-AE500U is an LCD projector, its black levels are higher than you’d see on a DLP model. That, in turn, limits shadow detail and makes some darker colors look desaturated. There isn’t an LCD projector manufacturer who’s figured a way around this problem yet, but the Panasonic box certainly does as well as the better models out there. PICTURE QUALITY Don’t expect much from the composite video input on the PT-AE500U. Its composite video decoder loses detail at 300 and 400 lines, and there’s plenty of color moiré present. Stick with S-video or component inputs whenever you can! Also, the PT-AE500U’s de-interlacing performance is average. Not great, but not bad. Feeding the projector 480p signals from my Faroudja-equipped Panasonic RP56 DVD player made a noticeable improvement in picture quality, particularly with live video sequences. While the projector switches quickly enough between 24 fps 2:3 material and 30 fps video, motion still looked better from the external DVD player. I swept the PT-AE500U’s component inputs to see if it had enough bandwidth to do justice to 720p and 1080i signals. Unfortunately, there is some noticeable signal roll-off above 18.5 MHz with both types of signals, and switching to RGB input mode didn’t really help things. DVI connections provided the cleanest picture, but I have no way (yet) of sweeping bandwidth through that type of input. After all that, I still found many things to like about the images this projector whips up. I chose Pirates of the Caribbean as a test DVD due to its low-level night battle scenes and bright primary colors, such as the red and blue uniforms on the British officers as seen in daytime. Switching to 720p mode, I played back sequences from last season’s ABC Monday Night Football clash between the Miami Dolphins and Philadelphia Eagles. Pictures were crisp; colors were again pleasing to the eye (particularly those hard-to-render orange and aqua Dolphins uniforms) and compared favorably with the reference monitor. Alas; black levels, as usual, limited shadow detail. I did spot some motion smear when the camera panned or zoomed quickly while players were running, which can happen with LCD panels. Some clips of the NHL All-Star Game in ABC’s 720p/60 format showed some of the same motion artifacts, but the color of the ice was about as clean a white as I have ever seen from an LCD projector. The last test was with a D-VHS tape of the 2004 Grammy Awards, recorded in the 1080i format from CBS. Some of the musical acts had unusual combinations of colored lighting splashed on stage during their performances, including some really “hot” lights that predictably caused some white “crush” on the PT-AE500U. Though shadow detail wasn’t equal to my reference monitor, color quality was still good, particularly when pastel color shades popped up. The noticeable blue-green bias of LCD projectors makes it really tough to render pastel colors and flesh tones accurately, but the PT-AE500 did an outstanding job here. To be honest, I couldn’t tell if the AI circuit made much of a difference in black levels and dynamic range. I left the projector in AI #2 setting most of the time, but the results with AI off weren’t really obvious. The high black levels of LCD panels may limit what this circuit can achieve – it would probably work better with a DLP design. CONCLUSIONS Panasonic’s PT-AE500U is one of the best widescreen LCD projectors you can find for $2500, thanks to its color management and rendering capabilities. Despite its problems with high black levels, the projector’s ability to fine-tune gamma and color settings makes it possible to get some beautiful images. On the other hand, the projector could use more bandwidth for component HD signals. I missed having a manual lens shift feature; digital keystone correction doesn’t ‘do it’ for me as I want to use every available LCD pixel. A little more light output would also be handy for large screens and rooms where lighting can’t be doused completely. NOTE: Shop around for a good price. I did a quick search on the Internet and found some aggressive on-line retailers selling the PT-AE500U for well under $2000. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• |
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