Panasonic PT-AE4000 review

Panasonic’s PT-AE4000E is the successor to the Ultimate award-winning PT-AE3000E. It’s just as good as you’d hope a projector this expensive to be. It has three HDMI inputs, as well as component, composite, S-Video and VGA, so you’re unlikely to run out of inputs. It’s exceptionally quiet when running, so you won’t need to blast the volume to hear quiet dialogue over it. The remote control is backlit for ease of use in the dark. Its controls are all replicated beneath a flap at the side of the projector.

It’s far from lightweight, so you won’t be moving it around much once it’s installed. However, it’s more flexible than most projectors when it comes to positioning, with vertical and horizontal lens shift wheels that allow you to easily adjust the position of the lens to point at your screen without the hassle of moving the projector itself. The 2x zoom lens can be shifted up to 40 per cent in either direction horizontally and 100 per cent on the vertical access, with provides plenty of room to manoeuvre. Once you’ve positioned everything to your satisfaction, a Lens Control menu allows you to configure zoom and focus using a handy calibration utility. You can save up to six different zoom, focus and lens calibrations, which is handy for watching content with different aspect ratios.

There are scores of other configuration options available from the menu, but they’re all clearly laid out and easy to access. Not all of them are very easy to understand and use effectively. Some are clearly for experts, like the waveform adjustment tool for tweaking the luminance of individual colours, which requires you to acquire and project test patterns to enable the projected to carry out auto-configuration. Others, like the Advanced settings in the Picture menu, allow you to manually tweak everything from colour and gamma to MPEG noise removal. This level of control is brilliant, particularly if you use Split Adjust mode, which creates side-by-side reproductions of the same part of the picture and shows the effect of your settings changes on one of them. However, the projector’s default settings are so good that you may never need to carry out any significant reconfiguration.

Image quality is outstanding, with natural, well balanced colour rendering deep, rich black tones are among the best we’ve seen from any projector, including those that use DLP technology. The PT-AE4000E put in an excellent performance in our moving image response test, motion blur was minimal and the lines of our playing card test image remained sharp as it moved across the display. If you want an even smoother viewing experience, you can enable Frame Creation mode, which interpolates extra frames. Three different settings range from subtle smoothing to a far more obvious smoothing effect in Mode 3. The latter is too extreme for normal viewing, but makes it much easier to follow the action during fast-paced sporting events.

At this price, the PT-AE4000E is one for serious home cinema enthusiasts but its phenomenal image quality and range of controls make this an ideal choice if you can afford it. We’ve given it our Ultimate award.