Panasonic PT-AE8000 Projector – Performance

Mike did some major settings changes to Dynamic, to improve the color a bit, from the original thin on reds, strong on blues and very strong on greens.  For a limited drop in lumen count from 1898 to 1637 – less than 15%, the picture quality visibly improved, as green became a bit less noticeable.  Mike’s adjustments are found on the Calibration page.

The end result looks pretty good for a brightest mode, with plenty of pop to the picture, a little over the top perhaps, and the underlying color tendencies are still there, but muted. In most cases, Mike’s result is very watchable compared to Dynamic, at the cost of only about a 10% drop in brightness from 1516 to 1355 lumens.

So what does all that horsepower give us? Have a blast….you can handle a decent amount of ambient light on mid-sized screens, for say sports viewing with friends. You can fill a much larger screen for movie viewing – pushing out to the 130″ plus range, if you are willing to sacrifice “best” color accuracy.

All considered the Panasonic measured just below average brightness, in its “best” mode, but is one of the brightest higher quality projectors around when you require a very bright mode! Panasonic claims 2000 lumens – impressive in its own right. As noted we measured over 1600 at brightest but we don’t set everything exactly how Panasonic would tell us to, to squeeze out every lumen.

As a good example, Mike measures with the Dynamic Iris off. In reading Panasonic info, they say the brightest measurements come when the iris is on. That means we may have missed a few dozen extra lumens.