Panasonic PT-AE8000 Projector Calibration and Settings 2

Mike’s Notes:   Overall, the projector looks really good.  Grayscale is not bad right out of the box, though there’s too much blue and too little red in Rec. 709 mode.  It calibrates fairly well (see graph), but the color temp and RGB balance are not as flat as I’d like to see (note the peaks of red at 40 and 50 IRE in the RGB Color Balance chart and the bumps in the Correlated Color Temperature chart.  None of this is really visible in actual use however.  There are extensive gamma settings available, but the simple gamma setting is so good, most people won’t bother with it.

The AE8000 can be very bright, with almost 2200 lumens in Dynamic mode with full wide zoom.  However, Dynamic is very green, not great for most viewing.  Doing a Quick Cal of Dynamic helps some, but the lumen output starts to drop rapidly.  As the brightest of the other modes (Normal) has a 33% drop from Dynamic and Rec. 709 is about one third as bright as Dynamic, the usable lumens for most viewing are comparable to other projectors that might have a lower rated maximum output.

The color gamut is decent by default in Rec. 709 mode, but can be improved with the CMS.  In particular, green and cyan are well outside of the Rec. 709 standard, but can be brought in line.  Similarly, magenta leans toward blue by default, but can be brought back into line (see CIE and CIE-CMS gamuts for before and after).  The result looks pretty good with most source material.  If your personal tastes are for less red in skin tones, you can always turn the main Color control down.