Projector's quality brings the movie theatre into the living room

By PETER GRIFFIN

Forget plasma and LCD flat TV screens. Forget widescreen cathode ray beasts and hulking rear-projection sets. The nirvana of home theatre is in LCD projection.

Sure, you need to draw the curtains and shift a bit of furniture to accommodate a projector in your lounge, but film is art and just as you wouldn't stick your favourite Van Gogh print in some dusty corner, you shouldn't have to peer into a small box to watch a flick.

Panasonic seems to have had that in mind when it made the PT-AE500E, a projector aimed at home-theatre enthusiasts.

In designing the projector, the Japanese electronics maker brought in a Hollywood movie colourist to advise engineers on the colour fidelity settings that would be programmed into the projector's memory.

Built into the projector is a high-definition (1280 x 720 pixels) wide screen (16:9) LCD panel with a three layer red-green-blue make-up giving around 2.76 million pixels.

It produces 850 ANSI lumens of light and has a contrast ratio of 1300:1. However, lumen and contrast ratings always confuse me. I've seen projectors with 2000:1 contrast ratio that don't appear to handle shadow any better than projectors with much lower contrast ratios.

As a rule, higher brightness often comes at the expense of contrast and colour sharpness. But AE500E handles contrast beautifully.

I used the AE500E against the brick wall of a warehouse and in a couple of lounges of different sizes and found the flexibility the projector gives to adjust colour and brightness settings means it can be tweaked for most make-shift movie theatres.

The new DVD remastered widescreen version of Pink Floyd: live at Pompeii was particularly fetching.

Molten lava and eerily lit amphitheatres look great blasted against the wall.

There's also flexibility when it comes to brightness with low and high lamp settings available. For the average-sized lounge a low lamp setting is fine.

The bulb doesn't glow as brightly, uses less power and means the fan cooling the whole system hums along a little quieter.

Using the low-lamp setting dramatically increases the life of the bulb - from about 2000 hours to 5000 hours.

The AE500E comes with standard factory colour settings but a second menu gives virtually unlimited scope for experimenting.

Contrast, brightness and gamma levels can be altered across six picture modes.

It's daunting at first, but you can revert to the factory settings if you get lost.

I was able to fiddle around with the colour settings to give U2's mainly black and white rockumentary Rattle & Hum a sharper look.

You tend to become an amateur colour technician after a while.

The AE500E continually adjusts the lamp brightness to match the characteristics of the picture being projected.

For low-light scenes, the blacks will appear blacker and contrast will be improved. All that is done in real time like the iris of the eye opening and closing depending on the light.

The "extra-short-throw" lens allows reasonably big images to be projected in small spaces. A 100-inch diagonal 16:9 widescreen image can be achieved from a distance to the wall of 3.1 metres. The image can be increased up to 200 diagonal inches.

Symptoms of the so-called "screendoor effect" where a faint grid appears to lie over the projected image are missing from the AE500E's projected images. Panasonic's "smoothscreen" technology works, with DVD-based source material the image is clear and crisp.

The AE500E has connections galore, everything you'll need is here. The LCD projector features a DVI-I port, a 15-pin VGA port, composite, S-video and RCA component ports.

The horizontal and vertical keystone can be digitally adjusted to straighten out the image if the projector has to be positioned at a weird angle.

Focus is adjusted manually by twisting the ring around the lense.

A simple remote control gives instant access to all the essential functions.

All of that and the projector is "high definition", meaning it is capable of processing signals encoded in high definition, a more complex format that allows enhanced digital pictures and sound to be delivered.

You won't hear Panasonic shouting too much about the high-definition feature of its projector because New Zealand is out of the high-definition loop.

In places such as the United States and Australia, TV signals are increasingly broadcast in high-definition, allowing for superb quality, especially in movies and sports events.

However, I watched high-definition scenes from Terminator 2 and the Coral Reef Adventure over the AE500E and the quality was impressive.

So, the future for me is the bog-standard 29-inch Sony for watching regular TV programmes and whichever decent projector I can get my hands on for a real home cinematic experiences.

I may just paint the walls of a room in my house matt-black and get some velvety curtains as well.

Quality viewing comes at a premium - $5000 is mid-range for projectors.

Panasonic PT-AE500E

* $4995.

* Panasonic

* Pros: Excellent image production, flexible settings, high-definition capable.

* Cons: High Definition currently of limited use.

* Rating: 8.5/10