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A few years ago I bought the Panasonic AE-900U which worked fine... for a while. I don't use it often, just to watch those "special event" movies etc., but after the warranty ran out, in fact practically the day after the warranty ran out, a year later and after only about 300 hours of use, the LCD units went out of convergence, making the picture look "fringed" with high contrast images... look like they have a blue line on the right and red on the left. There doesn't seem to be any way to correct this problem after searching on the net for any solution. This is particularly noticeable when you have the menus up on screen. Instead of white lettering, the lettering is divided into the three RGB colours, with some off by three pixels or so.

The thing's not completely unwatchable but I was really ticked off that this would happen at all with no way to fix it. I've read that it's "possible" to realign the units manually when you take the machine apart, but you have to REALLY know what you're doing to avoid further damage. And, with my experience with any of the service centers, they'll only make things work. In other words, if it's broke, they really WON'T fix it.

Panasonic's reputation of extremely bad customer service is well founded.

It seems to me that all Panasonic would need to do is have a program installed that allows you to electronically be able to re-align the pixels manually with a test pattern and the ability to shift each colour over a few pixels relative to each other. But, that would be making the machines last longer so we wouldn't have to toss it and spend another three grand on a new one, right?

Oh well. Yet another problem to add to the eventual lamp replacement.

I wonder if the new projectors have that problem? I guess we'll all find out a few days after those warranties run out. It's like they know exactly when to break down! :-(

When this projector finally packs it in, I won't be buying a new one. Too expensive for the short time you get to use it.