The Panasonic PT-AE700U LCD projector is not the best looking projector around, but if it can produce a great picture who’s going to worry about the box it comes from? Panasonic have made an effort to get away from the ugly industrial utility look. Thankfully the small efforts on the outside are more than offset by the big effort to get the inards of this LCD projector right.
Getting the Panasonic PT-AE700U LCD projector set up is very simple, in fact one of the simplist of any LCD projector on the market. Lens shift is achieved with a small manual joystick next to the lens, which is easier and more effective than a motor driven system. Focus and zoom are also manual, but have very fine controls so the pin sharp image you want is no problem. A simple, functional remote give you control of input and aspect ratio selection as well as the on-screen settings menu. This menu system also has no aesthetic design, but it does give in-depth control and fine tuning of just about every aspect of the PT-AE700U LCD projector.
Dynamic Iris
An emerging trend on the latest LCD projectors is an iris to help improve the contrast ratio. On the PT-AE700U the dynamic iris (Panasonic’s term) monitors the input video signal and makes constant adjustments to iris, lamp power and gamma. This means a bright scene will be brighter and a dark scene darker. The iris does increase contrast by up to 80%, depending on the projector lamp setting. It sounds impressive, but this is unlikely to make a significant difference to the image quality. The ANSI contrast ratio for this LCD projector is 161:1 and this is pretty much what you get. The iris does help, but this projector is stronger in other areas of picture quality.
LCD Projector Color
There is usually a trade off between light output and color accuracy: more light equals less accurate color. On the Panasonic PT-AE700U LCD projector a good deal of attention has been paid to getting very accurate color presentation. This means very natural, lifelike images. This quality is helped by the grey-scale tracking that is good enough not to be noticable, but is not perfect. As with the majority of LCD projectors black is not absolutely black, it has a slight hint of color, in this case blue. There are some projectors better in this department and plenty that are much worse.
A good number of LCD projectors have a real problem displaying smooth transitions in high contrast images from the dark shadow areas to the bright sections. The PT-AE700U is better than most at achieving a very smooth image. Whilst there may be some noise and stepping under test conditions, during a movie scene this is not an issue.
Image Quality
Image processing on the Panasonic PT-AE700U LCD projector is absolutely first rate. It is able to handle even the toughest video sequences with very few artifacts and good edge quality. Sharpness is subtly lower than LCD projectors of the same 1280 x 720 resolution (HDTV ready), but this is really not noticable except in side by side comparisons.
Another common failing with LCD projectors is what is known as the “screen door effect”. This is where the space between the pixels can be seen on screen giving the impression of viewing through a screen door. The Panasonic PT-AE700U is significantly better than the majority of LCD projectors in this regard.
Conclusion
The Panasonic PT-AE700U LCD projector has a simple, flexible setup and provides great color accuracy on a very bright image. Contrast and black levels are average, but image processing and overall image quality, together with a great price point for its features, make up for these minor shortcomings. The PT-AE700U is one of Panasonic’s best LCD projectors.
Features
Type: LCD
Native Resolution / Aspect Ratio: 1,280 by 720 / 16:9
Lamp Life: 3,000 hours
Different Lenses Available? No
Dimensions (H x W x D, inches): 4.09 x 13.19 x 10.63
Weight (pounds): 7.9
Connections
Inputs:
Video: HDMI (1), RGB (D-Sub 15) (1), component video (1), S-video (1), composite video (1)
Audio: none
Outputs:
Video: none
Audio: none
Additional: 12v trigger