Pearl and
JVC DLA-HD1
. But it's close. Dark scenes were convincing, the
dreaded "gray fog" was almost never a factor, and the subjective contrast
remained consistently good on both bright and dark material.
The Panasonic also produces a finely detailed image. The Sony Pearl and JVC
DLA-HD1 have now left my studio and were not available for a direct
comparison, but my feeling is that the PT-AE1000U falls into the middle of the
resolution gap separating those two projectors—a little sharper than the Sony, a
little less detailed than the JVC.
I was able to compare the Panasonic more closely, however, to the Optima
HD81. The Optoma was clearly sharper. It also had a more vivid image, with the
characteristic "pop" that DLPs generally excel at compared to competing
technologies.
But the Panasonic compensates with a film-like, very natural, non-digital look. By
"film-like" I do not mean soft, but rather a well-balanced combination of creamy
smoothness and detail that was a pleasure to see. And, of course, there were no
rainbow artifacts from this three-chip LCD design.
The projector's scaling and deinterlacing, in both HDMI and component, were
generally good to excellent, but with some exceptions. They were merely fair on
the waving flag test and on bad edits, and fair to poor on mixed content (video
scrolls over a film background and vice versa). But on the Silicon Optix
HD
Benchmark
HD DVD test disc, the Panasonic properly deinterlaced 1080i to
1080p on both film and video, and picked up 1080i 3/2 pulldown as well (it would
occasionally break lock on 1080i 3/2, but immediately recovered).
The Panasonic also exhibited good resolution on the multiburst test patterns from
my AccuPel test pattern generator. The response on the highest bursts at all
resolutions was visible, with one exception: There was no 37.1MHz response
over component in 720p. With other high-definition bursts, however, the
resolution lines at 37.1MHz were clearly visible, though dimmer than the 18.5KHz
bursts. This indicates a significant luminance rolloff at the higher frequency.
Even before my last calibration, the Panasonic's color was good on real program
material, despite those peculiar first measured results. But the projector really
deserves a professional calibration. The main change after a proper setup was a
slight but worthwhile improvement in flesh tones. Other colors were more natural
as well, though the improvement there was less obvious. The downside: that
reduction in light output.
Overall, the images from the Panasonic, given a reasonably good standard
definition or high-definition source and a good setup, looked consistently good,
and often stunning. This is the sort of performance you'd have had to pay big
bucks for—if you could get it at all—just a few years ago.
Содержание PT-AE1000U - LCD Projector - HD 1080p
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