Big Picture Big Sound

Two months after announcing their new PT-AE1000U 1080p LCD projector at CEDIA, Panasonic had a fully functional production sample of it on-hand at the CES Sneak Preview in New York this week, and it was a mighty impressive piece of gear. They also announced pricing - $5995 - less than I was expecting for this advanced 3-chip Full HD projector. Of course, this was a trade show, so you can't expect perfect viewing conditions, but the HD feed looked extremely detailed, projected on a 100-inch screen in the demo area.

The AE1000 measures in at a bright 1100 lumens, with 11,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. It features a C2Fine 1920X1080 native panel (actually three of them, on three .74" LCD chips), as well as a 14-bit gamma processor to enable a wide color palette. The AE1000 even includes a built-in waveform monitor for the tweakiest of video tweakers.

The AE1000 also features a new high definition 16-element aspherical glass lens, a "PureColor" color filter (which can be switched in or out, depending on content), as well as an advanced dynamic iris and gamma.

When we reviewed its "little brother" the 3-chip 720p PT-AX100U, one of our few reservations on the ergonomics was its limited lens shift range. The AE1000 offers a much wider range: 100 percent vertical and 40 percent horizontal lens shift, still not quite up to the Sanyo Z2's 50% horizontal lens shift, but this should be more than adequate for most installations.


We're in line for a review sample of this projector and hope to be sharing the results of this with you in the coming weeks. Bring on the Full HD!