Product Details
- Brand: Panasonic
- Model: PT-AE4000U
- Platform: Windows
- Format: CD-ROM
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.12" h x
18.11" w x
11.81" l,
16.09 pounds
- Native resolution: 1920 x 1080
- Display size: 0.74
Features
- Panasonic; projector; widescreen
Panasonic PT-AE4000U 1600 Lumen LCD Home Theater Projector
Product Description
The Panasonic PT-AE4000 is Panasonic's upgrade to the popular PT-AE3000U. It surpasses the Panasonic PTAE3000 in image quality, and has more features as well.The pure contrast plate in the PT-AE4000 uses an engineered crystalline material that is carefully matched to the characteristics of the LCD panels to effectively correct the passage of light exiting the panels. This enables the projector to block unwanted light leakage and successfully increases the dynamic range. It works together with the dynamic iris to achieve an astounding contrast ratio of 100,000:1.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
83 of 94 people found the following review helpful.
By Lawrence H. Bulk
This is only the second video projector I have ever purchased since I built my home theater 17 years ago but I have to say that it is an amazing product. I am certain that any purchaser will be extremely pleased with it. I am!I own a SharpVision XV-S250ZU Video Projector which I purchased in 1992. It was "state-of-the-art" in its day but, over time, its the LCD panels (organic) have deteriorated. (Still, 17 years is not a bad run!)Knowing that I would want to replace the SharpVision, I began doing research on projectors, starting in 2007. I quickly eliminated single-chip DLP projectors as, having seen quite a few of them, I have found that both my wife and I are unusually sensitive to the "rainbow" effect noticeable with this kind of projector. We primarily watch older black-and-white movies and this "rainbow" effect is especially apparent with this type of programming.I also quickly eliminated 3-chip DLP projectors due to their frightfully high cost.Concentrating on 3-panel LCD projectors, I got down to two models: the Epson Powerlite V11H337020 Home Cinema 8500 LCD Home Theater Projector and this one, the Panasonic PT AE4000U - LCD projector - 1600 ANSI lumens - 1920 x 1080 - widescreen - High Definition 1080p. Both of these use inorganic panels and so should last even longer than my SharpVision.The choice was difficult - I had no opportunity to see either "in the flesh" but, from what I have read (and I have read quite a bit), it seemed that, for our kind of viewing (older as well as newer movies, rare television and no games) and our venue (a fully darkened [with less than 5% ambient lighting] home theater), this one would be the better of the two. Almost all of the reviewers stated that this Panasonic produces much more "film-like" images than does the Epson (though, according to those reviews, they are fairly close).I should mention that we only rarely watch current television shows in our home theater but we do have a ePVision PHD-205LE HDTV Tuner ATSC / QAM (HD) / NTSC (Pass-through Only) Tuner Receiver Box. 1080i and 720p broadcasts look superb. Though we also own an OPPO BDP-93 Universal Network 3D Blu-ray Disc Player, we still view mostly standard definition sources (DVD, LaserDisc, and, believe it or not, S-VHS and VHS tapes! The overwhelming majority of the films we watch are only available in SD). However, standard definition looks spectacular in our theater as does the occasional high-definition (Blu-ray) video we watch.Now to the projector itself. I can tell you that setting it up is quick and easy and the image it produces literally runs rings around any LCD (or DLP) projector I have ever seen. Right out of the box its images look terrific and many people will be wholly satisfied without any 'tweaking' whatsoever.The contrast is excellent and the black levels are really, really fine in both color as well as black-and-white movies with deep blacks yet good detail.Black-and-white movies look superb.The color is breathtaking!Believe it or not, when watching a DVD or Blu-ray disc, you'll think you're watching film. I know that we've all seen this claim before - and far too often - but, with this projector, the claim is absolutely true.The overall picture is breathtaking too - FAR superior to any LCD or Plasma "flat-panel" television I have seen (and I've seen quite a few of them in "Home Theater Salons" as well as in peoples' homes). Only a very few older "high-end" CRT televisions can produce as vibrant a color palette as can this projector, at least in my experience, and their picture (image) size is obviously much smaller.This projector has many more features than any other in its price class (and even well above). The myriad settings are ALL user-adjustable; thus the owner never needs to have this projector professionally calibrated.And I can't stress too highly the advantages of a powered zoom lens, something the Epsons mentioned above lack. You can walk right up to the screen and adjust the focus perfectly rather than having to walk back and forth (or squint to see if focus is correct).Mentioning the lens reminds me to tell you that there are lots of adjustments available - zoom, focus, lens shift (both vertical and horizontal), keystone correction, etc. In other words, there are just about all the adjustments you will ever need. (There is even accommodation for an anamorphic supplementary lens should you be fortunate enough to have a very large theatrical screen which can benefit from such a lens.)This projector has many inputs, composite video (the old-fashioned kind), S-video, Component video (the three-cable type), a serial input, and an input labeled Computer (which is a VGA input). And, of course, it has HDMI inputs, three of them in fact.I effected some rudimentary changes in the color - I compared several options (and I have found that Cinema 1, really liked by some reviewers, is not satisfactory to me at least at this time; the colors are not saturated - they are not "colorful" but they, as all other color settings, CAN be 'tweaked'). I am currently using Color 1 for color films. For black-and-white, Cinema 3 looks really good. (I watched THE WAR OF THE WORLDS [1953] which has particularly vibrant color and one of the episodes of THE UNTOUCHABLES television shows which has excellent black-and-white cinematography and has many dark scenes.) But I have a lot more experimentation to try before I decide positively on the permanent settings (though I'm fairly certain I'll keep on using Color 1 for color pictures - it produces really beautiful images). (We also watched a bit of the following features: WHOOPEE [1930], an early two-color Technicolor feature, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK [1981], widescreen 2.35:1 and beautiful color - and spectacular sound, and MY FAVORITE YEAR [1982], 1.85:1 likewise with beautiful color.) You'll certainly want to experiment with the color settings - and, not to worry, if you 'mess them up,' there is a Default option on which you can click to go right back to the factory settings.Of course color settings are a matter of taste. What you like and what I like may be two very different things. You may be perfectly satisfied with the defaults. But, if not, changing them is easy.I left the format Autodetect feature On (the default) so the projector will recognize 4:3 and 16:9 programs and set the screen format automatically on my 16:9 screen. I also placed into the lens memory a setting for CinemaScope [Panavision] 2.35:1 to accommodate for my screen and this works perfectly.By the way, I was able to effect ALL of these changes and several more besides WITHOUT READING THE OPEhttps://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-gA6_nxOiRkHgoxFtrl97oePrhW3Ja1bCOEkTzTZ31leEOhr6vp4-SGwtFZL7fgebP-qTylPJl-_V27mlhlwyE1udRifq0o5ExqsHjZ21gPf3KMrQozTEf2txEPwkECgVz9kCpAIAoIE/s1600/rating.png MANUAL. This projector is that easy to use! (Of course I recommend that all owners DO read the manual and view the included CD-ROM.)I might mention that I can see NO pixels - NONE - even when I'm just two or three feet away from my screen. The screen is a Da-lite Pearlescent, purchased in 1992, and is 110" diagonal. The "throw" is 19 feet.Some professional reviewers have commented that this projector is not as bright as some others, including the Epson I mentioned. But, in my venue, the brightness of the Panasonic is so much more than adequate that I am able to use the Eco setting which reduces brightness and affords a 3000 hour average life to the bulb as opposed to operating it in Normal setting which gives only 2000 hours. I will be using that Eco setting; should the brightness become inadequate due to bulb aging, I can always switch to Normal. Of course I won't know about that for a good long time. (I also purchased a spare bulb which I recommend every purchaser do as well.)According to virtually all the reviews I have read, if you are using a video projector in several venues, bright rooms as well as dark ones (say, a living room during the daytime), the Epson, as well as a number of other projectors MIGHT be a better choice. (I cannot comment on this from personal experience however.)But if you plan to use a projector exclusively in a fully darkened room (a home theater), as I do, it is my opinion that, when you figure in performance and price, you can do no better than this one.I give it my highest recommendation and I thank you for reading this.
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
By J. K. Weston
The Panasonic AE4000U 3-LCD video projector is the second projector I have owned and the 4th I have used more than once or twice. After four and a half years of using my old Panasonic L300U video projector, I bought this new projector plus a Blu-Ray player.The old projector looked great on high definition TV broadcasts and very good on DVDs as long as they were brightly lit and colorful. High-def Football and other sports looked fabulous projected onto my 64 inch beaded glass screen, even when the room wasn't really dark and even though it wasn't really a true high definition projector. 1080i and 720p downrezed to my 1/4HD projector's native 540p (540x960) looked great and much better than DVD's native 480P. And with my eyeballs 11-12 feet from the screen or even 9 feet, I could not see pixels, and more pixels and detail would actually probably not have been visible (I thought). But I don't watch much sports and mostly use it for movies and high def TV. The major problem it had was with black levels. In black and white or color programs where there was very little black ever in the image there was no problem. In film noir, or Orson Welles films, or even the Buffy or Angel TV shows which have lots of dark and night scenes, the absence of black was a quite annoying problem. And my major criteria for a new projector were that it have black levels that actually look black, that it display 1080p signals, and also that it be able to display 24 frame per second (movie) signals at 24 fps. Other information I can get from reviews, but to see if black levels were good enough for ME, I had to see it. Unfortunately, stores basically don't have display models so it is hard to actually SEE what a picture looks like, as I found out when I took my copies of Citizen Kane and Star Wars episode II out to try to see some. Only a local high end dealer had a $6000 DLP projector which was very good but way out of my price range.Finally I found an online dealer which had a return policy that would have allowed me to return a projector for my money back if I didn't like it and had put less than four hours on the lamp. Among others, they had the Panasonic AE4000U, which sounded very promising based on reviews and I already had a Panasonic which, with certain reservations, I liked a lot. So I ordered it. The black levels weren't perfect but they were VERY impressive, as good, I thought, as the $6000 DLP I had seen. I projected a little bit of my Blu-ray Blade Runner and my wife saw a little of it and commented that it looked beautiful even thought she doesn't like the movie. After an hour or so of making adjustments and checking out some video material, but not directly comparing it to the old projector, I was pretty sure it was good enough and wanted to keep it and set up a test to show my wife, and myself. I covered the right half of the new projector lens and the left half of the old projector lens and in normal bright room light adjusted the pictures to the same size and to a smooth transition between sides when both projectors were being fed the same signal. Then I darkened the room, invited my wife in for a comparison of the old and new without yet knowing myself how they would look side by side in the dark and brought up a few scenes from the Star Wars episode II DVD.Between the OPPO Blu-ray player feeding a better quality signal via HDMI (vs component for the older projector) and the quality difference between the 6 year old projector and the new one, the difference was astonishing in terms of black level, color quality, brightness (in eco mode, yet), sharpness, you name it. It took my wife less than 30 seconds to say that we were keeping the new projector; not only that, but the Blu-ray player, about which she had been quite dubious, was indeed, she now agreed, also a worthwhile purchase. We shut the old projector off, removed the lens covering, and looked at more of Star Wars, some of Citizen Kane, and on Blu-ray, a bit of Blade Runner and a couple other odds and ends. We both came away very happy. The colors are much more natural and beautiful and the increase in detail is amazing.In isolation, the old projector still looks very good, except for black levels. But I am a little surprised at how much sharper the new one looks from 11-12 feet away. I think a good bit of it has to do with the improvement in apparent sharpness due to the better black level performance. There are 4 times as many pixels, but from 12 feet away, lots of extra pixels just aren't really visible, though the increase in pixels undoubtedly gets extra information to your brain even though you don't consciously see an increase. With the old projector, from 5 feet away, I could see pixels on on the 64 inch (diagonal) screen. From less than a foot away, I still can't see pixels with the AE4000U except sometimes on some test patterns, but not on any program material. It is like looking at film and very sharp even when viewed up close.A few days later, thinking about the very good but not perfect black levels, it struck me that film doesn't have perfect blacks either. The black levels with the projector aren't as good as the blacks on my old ProScan 27" CRT. But the blacks with this projector seem to me to be as good as I have ever seen in any color film with the possible exception of some--not all--3-Strip Technicolor(tm) IB prints and as good as any black and white film I have seen in a print less than 50 years old. This projector is mostly for viewing film. So that is good enough.I went to see the Princess and the Frog with the family when it was out and the theatre just didn't put enough light up on the screen which seriously degraded the experience. While the end credits were rolling, white text on a black screen, I walked up to the front and put my hand in front of the screen and could see my shadow clearly in the black. If they had been using adequate light it would have been even clearer. Images are much brighter at home and the shadows aren't much different.My default setting for all things video is now 1080p60, with 24fps enabled on my Oppo BDP-83SE. Fed to the AE4000U projected onto a 64 inch diagonal 9x16 screen, excellent DVD material, like Star Wars, episode II (specifically scene 15 Return to Naboo, which I have used as a test scene), really does look near HD. It isn't as sharp as Blu-ray or 1080i or 720p broadcast, but it really does look very good, enough so that I am not highly motivated to replace many DVDs with Blu-ray discs. I may change my mind when I get a 92 inch screen, but having stood up close to the screen and compared Blu-ray and DVD upscaled and at 24fps with the Oppo Blu-ray player (BDP-83SE, which I have also reviewed) and the AE4000U, I suspect that I won't. I should also note that viewed on other upscaling DVD players, DVDs don't look as good as they do on Oppo BDP-83 or BDP-83SE. Make no mistake, Blu-ray looks better, but with this system, Blu-ray's biggest advantage is high definition sound instead of Dolby Digital's lossy compression. I do plan to buy most new discs in Blu-ray, but I don't plan to replace many old ones unless for its for soundtrack upgrades. That said, I did upgrade North By Northwest, with its wonderful Bernard Herrmann score, and there are a handful of others I would jump at the opportunity to buy on Blu-ray for a sound upgrade.I also show virtually everything I watch with dynamic iris off and at the standard Cinema 1 setting for 6500K color temperature (for black and white or color), and I find that in general the color is gorgeous and very evocative of the experience of viewing movies in a good theatre where the management is really dedicated to a quality viewing experience (an attitude that is all too rare in movie theatres). And DVDs from Technicolor(tm) original sources, like the classic Warner Brothers Adventures of Robin Hood, really do approximate the experience of 3-Strip Technicolor(tm) Nitrate originals. So movies at my house often look better than in theatres.I think that having a player capable of outputting 24fps is very important and significantly upgrades the experience watching film based material. Some recommend it only for Blu-ray and "very well authored DVDs." I use it on all DVDs and and infrequently (not at all on many movies and, usually not more than 1-4 times per movie) I get a black frame at 24fps. I suspect this occurs when the player or projector looses cadence momentarily because of an improper edit point on the DVD. But the overall increase in how realistic movies look is well worth an occasional black frame.If the room is brightly lit and what I have on is ordinary TV that I am not much interested in, I will occasionally use the Dynamic setting, which throws more apparent light on the screen, instead of Cinema 1. But if it is something I care about, I'll darken the room and watch it in Cinema 1.This is an excellent projector. Buying this and and Oppo BDP 83 together at list price is an incredible bargain and will keep you happy watching and listening to movies on DVD and Blu-ray for a long time. And over-the-air high definition broadcasts in 720p or 1080i both look better than upscaled DVD.Update 6-29-10:For a while I have been conscious of this but I thought I would write it up fresh tonight. I just watched a Netflix DVD of Blindside tonight and on the Oppo using upscaling to 1080P through HDMI with 24 hz DVD playback enabled and through the Panasonic AE-4000 set to frame creation mode 1 (the least processing above no processing) on a 65 inch screen at 10 feet, I really was not conscious that I was watching a DVD rather than a Blu-ray disc. During the credits it is easier to tell, but watching the movie it is not. This is the same setup I use for virtually all DVD playback, and as usual there were a small number of black frames, a very small price to pay for such high quality viewing through this incredibly synergistic pair of instruments. With these 2 components, watching all of Blindside, a few minutes of The Searchers blu-ray and 2010 blu-ray and then a few minutes of the Blindside DVD again, there is not a lot of difference in image quality. I suspect with more magnification, for example with 2.35-2.4:1 scope/panavision movies blown up to the same vertical size, the differences will be much more apparent, because of the much higher resolution of blu-ray. But DVDs look awfully good on this pair.That said, watching parts of the same 3 movies 5 feet from the screen--the equivalent of watching on a 130 inch screen from 10 feet, The Searchers clearly looks better, as well it should, having been shot in VistaVision (essentially 70 mm). The difference between 2010 and Blindside is more subtle, slightly in favor of 2010, perhaps not as much as it should be with real 1080P instead of 480P upscaled to 1080P. But most significantly, the difference is subtle, not blatant.6/25/11 updateI received two comments recently, to which this update is a reply. Since writing the review, I have had the projector well over a year and have upgraded to a 92 inch ceiling mounted motorized screen. I still mostly view television about the same size as I used to--65 inches--but for movies on DVD or Blu-ray I use the full screen. The improvement of Blu-ray over DVD upscaled to 1080p 24 is considerably more noticeable on a 92 inch screen than on a 65 inch screen, but good DVDs still look remarkably good. At 92 inches pixels on content are still invisible, but on test pattern stills, you can see them if you get up close--that is how I fine tune focus when I change screen size back and forth between TV and movie size. If I got a larger screen, I would have to move my Magneplanar 1.7s out of their sweet spots and I would have to find a new place to put the projector. So my screen is staying. But, I am sure it would do a very nice job on a still larger screen.The Panasonic is such a fine and versatile projector that one would think that with a software upgrade, and perhaps an outboard infrared transmitter for either the projector or the Blu-ray and a pair of glasses, this ought to be a fine 3D projector, and I hope that someone at Panasonic is thinking along those lines. But otherwise I have no immediate plans to replace my trusty old Oppo BDP-83SE, which still puts out remarkable quality sound and pictures or this projector. But maybe someday I will get a BDP-95 if I become convinced it sounds significantly better. I recently had some friends over to watch the Blu-ray of Fantasia 2000. The picture wasn't as big, but it looked and sounded better than when I saw it a decade ago in a real IMAX theatre (not one of the phony little ones that pass for IMAX these days.) Sound and picture both were less distorted, better focused, and clearer, more detailed, and more natural. This is still a very fine projector.OPPO BDP-83SE - Blu-Ray disc player - upscaling - black
13 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
By Krista
I love this projector. I actually upgraded from the Panasonic PT-AE3000u (also great).I have noticed that this projector is brighter, has a clearer picture, better colors, and better contrast and black levels than the PT-AE3000u.It really shines with Blu-ray, but all sources look good.Not much else to say, but for the money, you can't beat it.
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