to ‘MODE1’. There was also a ‘MODE2’ and a Panel...
2
42 43 3D AV projector TEST to ‘MODE1’. There was also a ‘MODE2’ and a ‘MODE3’, plus ‘Off’. Examining its operation in the flyover scene at 50:00 in the Blu-ray of The Fugitive, it was clear that ‘MODE1’ generates one new frame between each real frame, while ‘MODE2’ generates more than one, perhaps two or three. Consequently there was a little judder left in ‘MODE1’, but it was far less objectionable than without motion interpolation. It worked well, didn’t place a glossy sheen over the picture, and didn’t generate any but the briefest and most subtle of heat-haze visual artefacts. This was eminently usable. MODE2 was silky smooth in this scene, but did leave significantly more noticable visual artefacts. MODE3 didn’t seem to add much, except a slightly glossier look and a touch more heat haze. So MODE1 would indeed seem the sensible default for all but the most critical viewing, since it allowed moving details that might otherwise escape attention to be easily visible. As for 3D, do yourself a favour and buy a set or two of Panasonic’s 3D glasses. With regard to the performance of this projector with 3D we have to say: bravo! At 25 grams, Panasonic’s current glasses are only a couple of grams heavier than the passive glasses used at the cinema, and so are fairly comfortable, far more so than the early models. But they use rechargeable batteries, and so need to be plugged into a USB device from time to time, hopefully not halfway through a movie. This projector does not have a USB socket, so you will have to use a computer or an iPhone charger. The potential problem with 3D in an LCD projector is the time it takes for the LCD pixels to change state. To work well they need to switch open and closed extremely quickly, but LCD cannot match, say, DLP for this. Even two or three milliseconds constitute a big chunk of the 21 milliseconds duration of one eye’s view of a Blu-ray 3D frame. To cover this up, 3D glasses go opaque in both lenses at various points of the display cycle. Panasonic has employed a 480Hz overscanning system to assist with this. By repeating frames at a higher rate, the total percentage of double-blanking can be reduced, allowing greater overall brightness. Or, at least, that is one way of using the greater frame rate. My feeling is that Panasonic has not turned down the blanking interval as much as some, so the 3D image is a bit darker in practice than it might be. Instead, it seems to me to have used the high frame rate to allow the double-blanking to more thoroughly cover the pixel-change times, better reducing crosstalk. For in that regard the performance was extremely strong — the best front projector we have yet seen in terms of crosstalk rejection, apart from DLP-based models. Yes, there was some ghosting perceptible. In the Golden Gate Bridge scene in Monsters P anasonic’s TVs are among the best when it comes to 3D, thanks in large part to the quick on/off switching of the plasma panels. But now it is also offering a 3D front projector, which employs LCD panels. Can the Panasonic PT-AE7000EA projector offer crosstalk-free 3D as well? EQUIPMENT Actually, we should say that the projector is ‘3D ready’, because it comes with no 3D eyewear, worth remembering if you’re planning family 3D movie showings, since they will set you back $149 per pair. It does have a built-in 3D sync emitter, and also supports an optional external emitter, which comes with a long cable and can be placed at the front of the room. Panasonic supplied one of these with the unit, though we didn’t deploy it because the built-in one worked fine bouncing its signal from the projection screen. The projector is a mid-sized unit and, as is Panasonic’s practice, it comes with a large zoom range of 2.0-to-1. To fill a 2.54-metre (100-inch) PANEL DISCUSSION Panasonic’s 3D projector uses LCD panels and a 480Hz overscanning system to reduce 3D crosstalk. But you get no glasses. What’s going on? 16:9 projection screen, the unit needs to be located between 2.98 and 6.00 metres from the screen. Powered zoom and focus are provided, along with a manual lens shift. Panasonic says that the unit is good for a contrast ratio of 300,000:1 and can deliver 2000 lumens. The lamp life is rated at 4000 hours, but unusually this rating is for the lamp operating at full power rather than the more common low power/eco setting used by others. How long do you get if you stick to ‘Eco’ mode? Panasonic only says: ‘This time increases greatly when [LAMP POWER] is set to [ECO].’ There are three HDMI inputs, along with all the legacy analogue ones, plus two ports that can be switched to operate either as triggers to offer some control to other equipment, or to run the optional external 3D sync emitter. PERFORMANCE Physical set-up of this projector should be easy, what with the 2:1 zoom range, the powered focus and zoom, and the horizontal and vertical lens shift. And indeed, the focus and zoom part of things is really easy. Choosing the ‘Lens’ key on the remote brought up a test pattern for focus and size, and the arrow keys could be held or tapped to make the adjustments, the latter allowing very precise settings. Precision is not a word associated with the lens shift, though. This is adjusted by means of a joystick accessed through a removable panel on the front of the projector. Turning the stick locks or unlocks it. But unlocking it did not make it smooth. I found myself pushing harder and harder on the stick until finally I had achieved enough force to get the mechanism free of friction, whereupon the projected image would jump a quarter to a third of a screen height. Push in the other direction, and the big jump would be repeated in reverse. That was the pattern: push as gently as possible and overshoot by a mile. Eventually I got it roughly right by backing off a long way and hoping a big jump would land in the right spot. Then I adjusted the projector’s angle, and to hell with a slight keystone error. Perhaps use the lens shift to set the projected image to roughly the right place and lock it off, then engineer your ceiling mount to put the image in the exact position. The projector offers six memories for lens adjustments, which you can name for convenience. These work for zoom and focus, not lens shift, of course, and are probably of little value for those functions (are you going to be moving your screen or the projector back and forth between two well-defined positions?). But it also has adjustable masks for all four sides of the picture, and these are among the parameters that are stored in the memories. SDTV often has a series of black and white dots in the first half of the top or bottom row of PROJECTION TECHNOLOGY: 3 x 18.7mm active matrix LCD panels RESOLUTION: 1920 by 1080 pixels ASPECT RATIO: 16:9 LAMP: 200W UHM LAMP LIFE: 4000 hours in ‘Normal’ (i.e. high) mode CONTRAST RATIO: 300,000:1 (Dynamic iris) BRIGHTNESS: 2000 lumens INPUTS: 3 x HDMI, 1 x component video,1 x S-Video, 1 x composite video, 1 x D-SUB15 CONTROL: 1 x RS-232C, 2 x Trigger/External 3D IR port DIMENSIONS (whd): 470 x 151 x 364mm WEIGHT: 8.7kg WARRANTY: One year (One year on lamp, or 500 hours of use, whichever is first reached) CONTACT: Panasonic Australia TEL: 132 600 WEB: www.panasonic.com.au • Very strong 3D performance • Very strong 2D performance • Reasonable price • Dreadful lens shift control • Substandard deinterlacing • No 3D eyewear included VERDICT Panasonic PT-AE7000EA 3D AV projector Price: $4179 pixels. HDTV doesn’t. With this projector you can easily have the former masked off simply by recalling the relevant lens memory. You can even assign this menu to the ‘Function’ key on the remote, making the switch simple. All that stuff done, the results were very impressive, although it depended on the signal standard fed to the projector because, basically, it wasn’t crash-hot with interlaced content. So let’s deal with that quickly: you get two options for controlling progressive-scan conversion. These are ‘On’ and ‘Off’ for the obscurely-named ‘Cinema Reality’ setting under the advanced picture menu. ‘Off’ simply treats all interlaced signals with standard motion-adaptive deinterlacing suitable to video-sourced content. ‘On’ has a go at detecting the signal type, but its ability in this regard was fairly mediocre. It treated much of an unchallenging clip from the eXistenZ DVD as video-sourced. On the other hand with interlaced text scrolling over a progressive background, it went for a film-sourced assumption. Even then, the heavily-combed text seemed to have some kind of leading ghost, which was unusual. On my test clips from the 1080i/50 Miss Potter Blu-ray, the auto-cadence detection was clearly in operation, switching noticably at one point from video to film-type deinterlacing. Of the four specific tests I use, it clearly failed three. The last one — the vertically scrolling credits at the end of the movie — were treated as video- sourced, but then processed in a strange way that led to the text squirming in a slightly creepy way as it moved up the screen. I had to switch my Blu-ray player over to 1080p output just to reassure myself that there wasn’t some previously unnoticed weirdness to the credits. In short, for the best results use high-quality progressive-scan devices to feed this projector. And with such signals the picture quality was glorious, especially with Blu-ray. The unit employs a dynamic iris to deepen dark scenes and make full blacks very black indeed. The iris was silent in operation, and there was never the slightest hint of visible brightness pumping during its operation. Yet it was clear that the native black levels were also quite impressive. Even with significant white content on the screen, black parts of the picture were satisfyingly inky, and accordingly convincing. The colour performance was natural with the default settings, and there were a good range of adjustment options if you want to get tweaking. By default Panasonic’s motion interpolation judder removal system — which it calls ‘Frame Creation’ — was switched on and set Panasonic PT-AE7000EA 3D AV projector Price: $4179 vs Aliens, you can see pink ghosts around the bridge towers against the blue sky. But they are so low in level that they do not detract from the 3D effect, so the 3D stood out beautifully. Even though overall brightness was down, the picture was quite comfortable to view because there was virtually no confusion of my visual processing system by the leakage of left and right eye images to the other eye. With white objects over black backgrounds the ghosting was a touch more noticeable, but for me was at least still limited to a level at which it did not significantly interfere with my sense of 3D. Note that I found myself happily running the projector in ‘Eco’ mode most of the time, in large part because at that level the fan noise was virtually unnoticeable. But ‘Normal’ gave a slightly brighter picture, which was useful for 3D. Unlike some, this projector doesn’t automatically switch to the higher lamp setting as soon as you watch in 3D, so you will need to change this manually. CONCLUSION So the Panasonic PT-AE7000EA is a fine 3D projector, and also a fine 2D projector. It is reasonably priced, though we can’t escape the feeling that you ought to get a set or two of 3D glasses in the box. Stephen Dawson
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Transcript of to ‘MODE1’. There was also a ‘MODE2’ and a Panel...
42 43
3D AV projectorTEST
to ‘MODE1’. There was also a ‘MODE2’ and a ‘MODE3’, plus ‘Off’. Examining its operation in the flyover scene at 50:00 in the Blu-ray of The Fugitive, it was clear that ‘MODE1’ generates one new frame between each real frame, while ‘MODE2’ generates more than one, perhaps two or three. Consequently there was a little judder left in ‘MODE1’, but it was far less objectionable than without motion interpolation. It worked well, didn’t place a glossy sheen over the picture, and didn’t generate any but the briefest and most subtle of heat-haze visual artefacts. This was eminently usable. MODE2 was silky smooth in this scene, but did leave significantly more noticable visual artefacts. MODE3 didn’t seem to add much, except a slightly glossier look and a touch more heat haze.
So MODE1 would indeed seem the sensible default for all but the most critical viewing, since it allowed moving details that might otherwise escape attention to be easily visible.
As for 3D, do yourself a favour and buy a set or two of Panasonic’s 3D glasses. With regard to the performance of this projector with 3D we have to say: bravo!
At 25 grams, Panasonic’s current glasses are only a couple of grams heavier than the passive glasses used at the cinema, and so are fairly comfortable, far more so than the early models. But they use rechargeable batteries, and so need to be plugged into a USB device from time to time, hopefully not halfway through a movie. This projector does not have a USB socket, so you will have to use a computer or an iPhone charger.
The potential problem with 3D in an LCD projector is the time it takes for the LCD pixels to change state. To work well they need to switch open and closed extremely quickly, but LCD cannot match, say, DLP for this. Even two or three milliseconds constitute a big chunk of the 21 milliseconds duration of one eye’s view of a Blu-ray 3D frame. To cover this up, 3D glasses go opaque in both lenses at various points of the display cycle.
Panasonic has employed a 480Hz overscanning system to assist with this. By repeating frames at a higher rate, the total percentage of double-blanking can be reduced, allowing greater overall brightness. Or, at least, that is one way of using the greater frame rate.
My feeling is that Panasonic has not turned down the blanking interval as much as some, so the 3D image is a bit darker in practice than it might be. Instead, it seems to me to have used the high frame rate to allow the double-blanking to more thoroughly cover the pixel-change times, better reducing crosstalk.
For in that regard the performance was extremely strong — the best front projector we have yet seen in terms of crosstalk rejection, apart from DLP-based models.
Yes, there was some ghosting perceptible. In the Golden Gate Bridge scene in Monsters
Panasonic’s TVs are among the best when it comes to 3D, thanks in large part to the quick on/off switching of the plasma panels. But now it is also
offering a 3D front projector, which employs LCD panels. Can the Panasonic PT-AE7000EA projector offer crosstalk-free 3D as well?
EquipmEnTActually, we should say that the projector is ‘3D ready’, because it comes with no 3D eyewear, worth remembering if you’re planning family 3D movie showings, since they will set you back $149 per pair. It does have a built-in 3D sync emitter, and also supports an optional external emitter, which comes with a long cable and can be placed at the front of the room. Panasonic supplied one of these with the unit, though we didn’t deploy it because the built-in one worked fine bouncing its signal from the projection screen.
The projector is a mid-sized unit and, as is Panasonic’s practice, it comes with a large zoom range of 2.0-to-1. To fill a 2.54-metre (100-inch)
Panel Discussionpanasonic’s 3D projector uses LCD panels and a 480Hz overscanning system to reduce 3D crosstalk. But you get no glasses. What’s going on?
16:9 projection screen, the unit needs to be located between 2.98 and 6.00 metres from the screen. Powered zoom and focus are provided, along with a manual lens shift.
Panasonic says that the unit is good for a contrast ratio of 300,000:1 and can deliver 2000 lumens. The lamp life is rated at 4000 hours, but unusually this rating is for the lamp operating at full power rather than the more common low power/eco setting used by others. How long do you get if you stick to ‘Eco’ mode? Panasonic only says: ‘This time increases greatly when [LAMP POWER] is set to [ECO].’
There are three HDMI inputs, along with all the legacy analogue ones, plus two ports that can be switched to operate either as triggers to offer some control to other equipment, or to run the optional external 3D sync emitter.
pErformanCEPhysical set-up of this projector should be easy, what with the 2:1 zoom range, the powered focus and zoom, and the horizontal and vertical lens shift. And indeed, the focus and zoom part of things is really easy. Choosing the ‘Lens’ key on the remote brought up a test pattern for focus and size, and the arrow keys could be held or tapped to make the adjustments, the latter allowing very precise settings.
Precision is not a word associated with the lens shift, though. This is adjusted by means
of a joystick accessed through a removable panel on the front of the projector. Turning the stick locks or unlocks it. But unlocking it did not make it smooth. I found myself pushing harder and harder on the stick until finally I had achieved enough force to get the mechanism free of friction, whereupon the projected image would jump a quarter to a third of a screen height. Push in the other direction, and the big jump would be repeated in reverse. That was the pattern: push as gently as possible and overshoot by a mile. Eventually I got it roughly right by backing off a long way and hoping a big jump would land in the right spot. Then I adjusted the projector’s angle, and to hell with a slight keystone error.
Perhaps use the lens shift to set the projected image to roughly the right place and lock it off, then engineer your ceiling mount to put the image in the exact position.
The projector offers six memories for lens adjustments, which you can name for convenience. These work for zoom and focus, not lens shift, of course, and are probably of little value for those functions (are you going to be moving your screen or the projector back and forth between two well-defined positions?). But it also has adjustable masks for all four sides of the picture, and these are among the parameters that are stored in the memories.
SDTV often has a series of black and white dots in the first half of the top or bottom row of
Projection technology: 3 x 18.7mm active matrix LCD panelsresolution: 1920 by 1080 pixelsAsPect rAtio: 16:9lAmP: 200W UHMlAmP life: 4000 hours in ‘Normal’ (i.e. high) modecontrAst rAtio: 300,000:1 (Dynamic iris)Brightness: 2000 lumensinPuts: 3 x HDMI, 1 x component video,1 x S-Video, 1 x composite video, 1 x D-SUB15control: 1 x RS-232C, 2 x Trigger/External 3D IR port
Dimensions (whd): 470 x 151 x 364mmWeight: 8.7kgWArrAnty: One year (One year on lamp, or 500 hours of use, whichever is first reached)
contAct: Panasonic Australiatel: 132 600WeB: www.panasonic.com.au
• Very strong 3D performance• Very strong 2D performance• Reasonable price
• Dreadful lens shift control• Substandard deinterlacing• No 3D eyewear included
VErDiCT
Panasonic PT-AE7000EA 3D AV projectorPrice: $4179
pixels. HDTV doesn’t. With this projector you can easily have the former masked off simply by recalling the relevant lens memory. You can even assign this menu to the ‘Function’ key on the remote, making the switch simple.
All that stuff done, the results were very impressive, although it depended on the signal standard fed to the projector because, basically, it wasn’t crash-hot with interlaced content. So let’s deal with that quickly: you get two options for controlling progressive-scan conversion. These are ‘On’ and ‘Off’ for the obscurely-named ‘Cinema Reality’ setting under the advanced picture menu. ‘Off’ simply
treats all interlaced signals with standard motion-adaptive
deinterlacing suitable to video-sourced content. ‘On’ has a go at detecting the signal type, but its ability in this regard was fairly mediocre. It treated much of an unchallenging clip from the eXistenZ DVD as video-sourced.
On the other hand with interlaced text scrolling over a
progressive background, it went for a film-sourced assumption. Even
then, the heavily-combed text seemed to have some kind of leading ghost, which
was unusual.On my test clips from the 1080i/50 Miss
Potter Blu-ray, the auto-cadence detection was clearly in operation, switching noticably at one point from video to film-type deinterlacing. Of the four specific tests I use, it clearly failed three. The last one — the vertically scrolling credits at the end of the movie — were treated as video- sourced, but then processed in a strange way that led to the text squirming in a slightly creepy way as it moved up the screen. I had to switch my Blu-ray player over to 1080p output just to reassure myself that there wasn’t some previously unnoticed weirdness to the credits.
In short, for the best results use high-quality progressive-scan devices to feed this projector.
And with such signals the picture quality was glorious, especially with Blu-ray. The unit employs a dynamic iris to deepen dark scenes and make full blacks very black indeed. The iris was silent in operation, and there was never the slightest hint of visible brightness pumping during its operation.
Yet it was clear that the native black levels were also quite impressive. Even with significant white content on the screen, black parts of the picture were satisfyingly inky, and accordingly convincing. The colour performance was natural with the default settings, and there were a good range of adjustment options if you want to get tweaking.
By default Panasonic’s motion interpolation judder removal system — which it calls ‘Frame Creation’ — was switched on and set
Panasonic PT-AE7000EA 3D AV projectorPrice: $4179
vs Aliens, you can see pink ghosts around the bridge towers against the blue sky. But they are so low in level that they do not detract from the 3D effect, so the 3D stood out beautifully. Even though overall brightness was down, the picture was quite comfortable to view because there was virtually no confusion of my visual processing system by the leakage of left and right eye images to the other eye.
With white objects over black backgrounds the ghosting was a touch more noticeable, but for me was at least still limited to a level at which it did not significantly interfere with my sense of 3D.
Note that I found myself happily running the projector in ‘Eco’ mode most of the time, in large part because at that level the fan noise was virtually unnoticeable. But ‘Normal’ gave a slightly brighter picture, which was useful for 3D. Unlike some, this projector doesn’t automatically switch to the higher lamp setting as soon as you watch in 3D, so you will need to change this manually.
ConCLuSionSo the Panasonic PT-AE7000EA is a fine 3D projector, and also a fine 2D projector. It is reasonably priced, though we can’t escape the feeling that you ought to get a set or two of 3D glasses in the box. Stephen Dawson
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