Panasonic PT-AE8000 Special Features 3

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Art Feierman

PT-AE8000 2D to 3D Conversion

I really have not spent a lot of time with this feature - I generally think it's fun for viewing your own vids, but I don't know if I'm ready to start converting 2D movies to 3D. Still, each generation of 2D to 3D conversion gets better. A nice secondary feature to have.

PT-AE8000 Lamp Life

Panasonic rates their lamp in the PT-AE8000 as 4000 hours at full power, and 5000 hours in Eco-mode. Excellent! about as good as it gets short of an LED or other solid state light source projector. Most of the competition is more in the range of 2000/3000, and 3000/4000, although the competing Epson offers the same 4000/5000 hour claim.

The replacement lamp has a list price of $379.

Bottom line: Excellent lamp life. The lamp cost is a bit higher than average for sub $3500 projectors.

Other Dynamic Controls

As is the case with most home theater projectors today, there are multiple additional dynamic features, which can come into play for sharpness, gamma, etc. We do most of our testing with these turned off. Every cool dynamic feature takes something else away, when it adds some other performance. There are always trade-offs. That makes most of those dynamic controls personal preference based.

There are almost an infinite number of combinations of dynamic controls when you consider sharpness and detail enhancement, contrast (dynamic iris), gamma, and the others. Adjust one a bit, and something else reacts slightly. We could spend weeks and not get a good handle on how they all interact with the image and each other at different settings. Mike kept to "simple" settings for gamma, for example, so as to avoid opening that "can of worms". He also found the gamma to be quite accurate. You get multiple nice features to play with, then you can choose and stick with the ones you really like, if that's the case, or maybe stick to the non-dynamic ones.

The PT-AE8000 (and the EU PT-AT6000), will provide you with plenty of choices and combinations to choose from!

Time to take look at the hardware.