Panasonic PT-AT6000E review

Panasonic projectors have always been an object of desire for home cinema fans, and the PT-AT6000E is unlikely to be an exception. It’s the company’s latest three LCD projector and has plenty of inputs, intelligent frame creation and active 3D support, among other great features.

It’s also intimidatingly large. Even with its slightly curved edges, it’s a big, bulky box that will struggle to fit on a coffee table or bookshelf. It’s built to be mounted from a ceiling, although the extendable feet mean you could perch it on a desk or dining table if necessary.

The lens is mounted off-centre, with the lens shift control stick hidden beneath a removable panel. Unfortunately, there’s no electronic shift, but there’s great vertical range and reasonable horizontal range, so you should be able to set up the projector without resorting to keystone. Zoom and focus are both electronic, letting you adjust for different aspect ratios once the unit is installed, and there’s even a lens memory mode to save different presets.

As with previous Panasonic home cinema projectors, there are no integrated speakers on the PT-AT6000E. Considering the cost of the unit and its target market, we’d expect any onboard speakers to go unused anyway.

Its inputs are located on the back of the projector and include three HDMI ports, component, composite and S-Video inputs, a VGA input and an RS232C port to integrate the unit within a fully automated home cinema system. If you’re lucky enough to have a home automation system, you can use the PT-AT6000E’s two trigger outputs to perform actions such as activating blinds, drawing curtains and lowering projector screens.

There’s a set of buttons on the side of the projector, but the compact remote control is much more convenient for switching inputs and changing settings. It’s backlit, which makes finding the right button in the dark far easier, and it has a shortcut key for every major feature, including picture mode, switching from 2D to 3D, loading saved lens configurations and adjusting the image.

Out of the box, the PT-AT6000 coped fairly well with our brightly lit test room. It produces 2,400 lumens thanks to its new 220W lamp, which is roughly 20 per cent more lumens than is produced by the Panasonic PT-AT5000E’s 200W lamp. Panasonic has redesigned the lamp module for 2013, improving heat dissipation without forcing the fan to spin faster. It was certainly quiet in general use, never becoming too loud. Although you could feasibly use the PT-AT6000E to watch football without putting the room in complete darkness, you’ll definitely want to dim the lights for films.

Picture quality, especially when watching high-definition video, was excellent. It was virtually impossible to spot the pixel structure of the image, even when right next to the projection. Panasonic’s Detail Clarity image sharpening feature did a fantastic job at bringing out the detail of our test clips, with uniform sharpness across the image. In a dark room, the new lamp really proves itself, producing bright and colourful images with plenty of contrast. Black levels, typically a sticking point for many projectors, were impressive but not perfect. Even so, they’re up there with some of the best projectors we’ve seen.

Of the multiple picture modes, the REC709 preset is undeniably the best; the dynamic and high-brightness modes emit as much light as possible but sacrifice picture quality in the process, and colours appeared slightly muted in all of the Cinema modes. Panasonic’s menu system is fairly plain, but it’s easy to navigate and makes it easy to tweak picture settings. Each toggle, slider and option minimises the interface to help you better judge whether your adjustments are improving the picture or making it worse. There’s plenty to adjust too, such as brightness, colour, contrast and sharpness.

The PT-AT6000E also has a lot more advanced features, including dynamic iris, intelligent frame creation, a rather complex colour management system, noise reduction, greyscale and gamma control, including luminance and even a waveform viewer. We disabled the dynamic iris for the majority of our testing in order to get uniform results, and after calibration found no reason to enable it again. We had to judge Frame Creation a little more subjectively. With the option disabled, it was easy to spot 24p Blu-ray footage; some of us think this gives the impression of being in the cinema, but others hate it. Switched to its lowest setting, the same footage appears much smoother but doesn’t introduce motion artefacts.

3D image quality was equally impressive, although not quite up to the same lofty standards as 2D video. There’s a small amount of additional judder when watching 24p Blu-rays and we also spotted a tiny amount of crosstalk, which didn’t disappear when we changed the brightness of the glasses. Panasonic bundles two sets of 3D glasses with the PT-AT6000; they’re much lighter than designs from previous years and recharge using a Micro USB port. If more than two people want to watch 3D video, you’ll have to pay around £80 for each additional set.

The PT-AT6000 competes well with other high-end projectors, such as the Sony VPL-HW50ES and the Epson EH-TW9100, and in many respects it outperforms, with excellent connectivity and extensive calibration settings. There are a few small inconsistencies with 3D playback and black levels, but with some tweaking you can produce a fantastic picture. We think that the pin-sharp images and incredibly accurate colours give Panasonic PT-AT6000E the edge, making it the projector to buy.