Panasonic PT-AE8000 Projector – Image Quality

Posted on July 18, 2013 By Art Feierman

The usual reminder about the accuracy of these images taken of projected content from the Panasonic PT-AE8000 home theater projector:

A lot goes on in delivering these images to your eyeballs: There’s the projected image, and any shifts due to the camera, (a Canon 60D professional dSLR), a Mac laptop for cropping and resizing, etc, using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, then saved “for web” (super compressed), and displayed with your graphics card, monitor, and browser all, further coloring the PT-AE8000 photos. In other words, they are useful, only to a point, as colors are not going to be all that accurate. Rest assured, the Panasonic PT-AE8000 will look far better in your darkened theater, than these images on your computer monitor.

Panasonic PT-AE8000 Out of the Box Picture Quality

The PT-AE8000 has lots of color modes. We found the best color, however, right out of the box, to be the REC 709 mode (officially that’s the HDTV standard). The other close to “best” is the D-Cinema mode, although many may find that dark.

Cinema 1, 2, and Normal all look reasonably good, but each is cooler – color temp wise, than the one before, and white is about 7500K to 9000K+ for these modes. D-Cinema, and REC 709, though are right about where they should be, right around: 6500K.

Only Game and Dynamic can routinely seem “over the top”. That’s no surprise for those two modes.

Out of the box performance, therefore, is overall, very good. Just choose the right mode for what you are viewing, and remember, our settings should help you improve the “out of the box” accuracy, without having to hire a calibrator (who would do a better job though)!

Click Image to Enlarge

Panasonic PT-AE8000 Projector - Flesh Tones

Once calibrated, the Panasonic’s skin tones took on a very natural look. Not perfect. I mention above, that the images have a slight “salmon” colored shift. Let me say that the projector seems to exhibit this after calibration, but it is significantly exaggerated in the photos, compared to live. Minor further tweaking of the calibration, or, perhaps if we actually calibrated the individual colors as a professional calibrator normally would, that this might well disappear completely, at least from the projected image.

Panasonic PT-AE8000 Image Quality Slideshow

SKIN TONES

Gandalf from the Blu-ray version of Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King
SKIN TONES

Arwen from the Blu-ray version of Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King
SKIN TONES

Here are three James Bond images from Casino Royale. Each has a different lighting scenario, the first - full sunlight, the second image; indoor fluorescent, and finally, a night time photo. As one would expect, that causes each image of James Bond - Daniel Craig - to have different looking skin tones.
SKIN TONES

James Bond images from Casino Royale
SKIN TONES

James Bond images from Casino Royale
SKIN TONES

Leeloo
SKIN TONES

Hugo
SKIN TONES

Pippin
SKIN TONES

Hugo