[kballs]

Now that I've had my Panasonic AE700 for about 1 year now I thought I would give a status update on its health and performance.

Overall I'm still happy with it, though it is aging.

Health
At about 300 hours the lamp failed and was replaced under warranty. The failure was hard to diagnose because it happened gradually (the projector had a blinking LED and was taking longer and longer to turn on).

After that, no more lamp problems.

Now at 1 year, it looks like the heat-cool cycles have moved the panels out of alignment (the test grid shows them off by about 1 pixel in vertical and 1.5 in horizontal). This could be partly worsened by dust, but dust wouldn't explain the horizontal AND vertical misalignment. I have actually seen this on most LCD projectors over 1 year old (ones I have owned or ones in meeting rooms at work), so it's not something I consider unusual, just an annoying trait.

There is also some dust building up inside the lense. I suspect this is because the projector has more exhaust fan than intake (does it even have intake fans?), which would mean a low pressure inside the projector when running (so dust would be sucked into every tiny slit over time, including the lense). This is a little annoying in a smaller lense like the one in this projector, since the dust seems to bounce a good amount of light in undesirable directions. I have yet to see dust blobs in the image, so I suspect my panels are still fairly clean (though eventually I'll need to crack the case and blow them off).

Performance
The projected image still looks good. I never changed any brightness/contrast settings from the factory as they looked spot on for full lamp mode in a varying ambient light environment (I'm sure tweaking them would give better low lamp mode contrast and low black levels, but my environment is typically too light for low lamp mode). The misaligned panels soften the image somewhat, but for most material (TV, movies, xbox) you don't notice (it's mostly noticeable for sharp text menus for the projector or TV, and probably for native resolution PC use - which I don't use).

For the Future
From the things happening with this projector (dust, misaligned panels) and past projectors, I'm thinking my next unit should have some features to alleviate the long-term usage issues. Some of the new pocket projectors are using LED light sources... if they figure out how to fit bigger LEDs or a larger array into a home theater sized unit, they would reduce/eliminate heat issues (alleviating the need for a fan - no noise, no dust, allow for sealed optics). Also because of the convergence issues I've seen with many 3-panel/3-chip units, I'm thinking a single panel DLP would be nice (when combined with fast switching LEDs instead of a color wheel, which would pretty much eliminate rainbowing - since LEDs can switch on and off thousands of times per second).