|
|
Panasonic PT-L500U by Paul - Nov 15, 2004
|
||||||||||||||||||
| HD 720 (1280x720), 850 ANSI Lumens, 6.4 lbs, $2,499 (MSRP) |
|||||||||||||||||||
| Post Your Opinion | Flag This Opinion |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
| Personal Experience |
| Hands down this projector is the best decision I have made for my home entertainment center. I've broken my comments into 4 main blocks, Cost, Image Quality, Setup, and some final thoughts. Cost - About 4 months ago I convinced myself to buy my first big screen hd tv, my default action was to take a trip to best buy. I looked at all the flashy plasmas and rear projectors but was turned down by the cost. There is no way I could justify the cost of owning a TV that cost more then my car. A coworked introduced me to the idea of buying a projector. The simple idea of owning a 100" TV for under $2000 was excellent. I did some research on this site and the avforums and was blown away by some of the claims. It seemed some people just love projectors and some always got nailed by some funny effect that they claim is a defect and would never buy another projector. I decided to see how much the environment and setup affects image quality. I found that I could create effects like SDE, and vertical band just by changing various aspects in my setup. There are a lot of factors other then the projector that play into image quality, if you buy one expect to have a little fun tweeking and tinkering. I am kind of addicted to all forms tinkering. Anyway, here is the info I gathered. Screen Door Effect - This seemed mostly to be caused by spreading the image over too large a surface and then sitting too close to the screen. Certain glossy surfaces enhanced the effects making the SDE worse. SDE first became noticable when I made the image 120" diagonal and was sitting about 4 feet from the screen, the surface for this test was a white wall. For high gain screen it was noticable with a 100" diagonal at about 5 feet. Any image size around or less then 80" should have no visible SDE. Keystoning the projector also seemed to cause a little more SDE near the wide end of the image. Vertical Banding - This is so funny its unreal, the simple cause of this is the pixel clock, there are a few things that can cause a bad pixel clock, the device generating the video image, the cable or the refresh rate of signal. I found that even with the correct resolution and the right cable a wrong refresh rate would cause horrible vertical banding, in some cases the image became squashed and colors would shift slightly. For those of you in Europe there is a european version of this product, Do not buy the US version the difference in the 50 and 60Hz power might cause vertical banding that will not be correctable. I think the L500-U is the US version and the AE500-U is the European. (Can someone please confirm this) Image Quality - The bottom line is the image quality is only as good as the source of the image. Buy a bad dvd player or bad cable and it will horrible. With a digital signal traveling 6 feet or less at 1280x720 the image was better then any HDTV I had seen in best buy, and I mean better in brightness, contrast and overall image quality. I could walk right up to the screen and look at the pixels, and they were perfect. Absolutely focused and sharp. Brightness and Contrast - I went back to best buy and start looking more at the specs of their big screen tv's and noticed that a lot of the LCD TVs had contrasts between 400:1 to 800:1. The contrast on this unit is better then most LCDs and on par with other displays. There is a side note that contrast measures the difference between the darkest pixel and lightest pixel and does not give any comparison regarding how dark is the darkest dark. The brightness value only tells us how bright the screen as a whole can get in its full-on state. None of the statistics can describe what the black level truely is. When I turn on my 17" CRT I notice that there is a black border around the part of the screen that is "on" Even when the screen is all black. Turning the brightness down lessens the effect. The same is true for the projector, reducing the brightness gave the image a much better contrast and black level. I tend to not like my CRT or my pj at a high brightness anyway because it seems to give more eyestrain then keeping the brightness at a mid level. If you think the black level is too bright, and turning your brightness down washes out the screen this means you have too much ambient light in the room and need to make the screen size smaller. Keystoning - Excess keystoning seems to cause a little bit of screen door. The biggest difference in using the keystone option was the reduction in image size. I wanted a big screen and perfect image quality so I opted to rearrange the room before I'd even consider keystoning my pj. Optimally don't plan on keystoning more then about 10 degrees and definately not more then 25 degrees especially if you are planning on using analog inputs. Display surfaces: I viewed a screen made from the Digital Goo systems paint at a coworkers house, a white wall, abs opaque plastic and a white board. The white board was bad because it was so glossy. Noticable hot spots in the image where too much light was being reflected, bright circles and eyestrain made it rather annoying to watch. Also there is a trade off between contrast and brightness, the more you improve one, the worse the other seems to get. If you feel you need better brightness go for the high contrast grey stuff. Speaking of, that was something that was not available to me, which I wanted very much to compare but after being satisfied with my wall I just couldn't justify the additional cost. Presently I have it set up for a 110" diagonal image, no Visible SDE or banding from 8' away, with a 1280x720 VGA at 60Hz vertical refresh rate, and it looks pixel perfect and better then going to the movies because I get to sit in my couch and have drink while I watch my favorite movies and games. |
| Problems |
| See Above |
