[The News Bot]

Panasonic has unveiled their new PT-AE4000 LCD projector which is due for release in October.** AVForums once again got the exclusive sneak peek of the unit and have published a video preview at www.avforums.tv

Panasonic PT-AE4000


There are some interesting new calibration features which include a full 3D Colour Management System (CMS) and a 9 point Gamma tool.* These join the waveform monitor and full RGB white balance controls.* The frame interpolation technology also gets an upgrade with a mode 3 function within the frame creation tool and an automatic function for the cinemascope zoom function.

The full details are explained in the press release below and in video form at www.avforums.tv

Press Release.


Panasonic launches PT-AE4000 projector for the High End Home Cinema market



New PT-AE4000 delivers powerful home cinema experience with new red rich lamp, crisp detail reproduction, and professional-level tuning features




Berlin, Germany, 3 September, 2009 – Panasonic Corporation, today announced the launch of its newest full HD home cinema LCD projector, the PT-AE4000, designed for a prosumer audience of savvy home theatre enthusiasts and audio video professionals. The new projector comes equipped with Panasonics new optical system and delivers 1080p *(1,920 x 1,080 pixel) *images with remarkable clarity, 1,600 lumen brightness, 80,000:1 contrast ratio and 100Hz Intelligent Frame Creation blur reduction technology.

Panasonic PT-AE4000


The PT-AE4000 is the next stage in the evolution of its award winning predecessor, the PT-AE3000 that was widely praised by the home cinema community for its Hollywood tuned high picture quality. Home theatre enthusiasts can now benefit from a 2.35:1 wide aspect screen, eliminating the Cinemascope issue and bringing the original picture quality intended by film and TV directors to the domestic market. Unique to Panasonic, the new Lens Memory 2, memorises up to six different zoom/focus positions and automatic switching between 16:9 and 2.35:1 contents can be set due to the PT-AE4000’s new signal aspect detection capability.

Commenting on the new projector, Hartmut Kulessa, Marketing Manager Projectors of Panasonic said: “The AE4000 embodies the collective effort of our engineers’ collaboration with movie image experts for an uncompromised picture quality, as well as offering many innovative features that seamlessly integrate the projector into the home theatre setup.”

Panasonic PT-AE4000

New UHP Red Lamp


The new LCD projector also comes equipped with a host of professional-level features that let the user fine tune the image quality to best fit the viewing environment.* These include the Advanced Gamma Adjustment, which allows the user to freely control the output and input level of the gamma curve.* The PT-AE4000’s Waveform Monitor, measures the level of brightness from a given video signal source and quickly makes adjustments to optimise it to the specific home theatre set-up. Having three HDMITM (deep colour and x.v.color) inputs as opposed to the typical two found on other similarly priced projectors, the PT-AE4000 allows users to connect multiple HD sources without a HDMI switcher.

Initial setup and installation are quick and simple, as the projector’s lens shift capability enables 100 percent vertical adjustment and 40 percent horizontal adjustment so that viewers can suspend the projector either close to the ceiling or on wall mounts.* The lens-centred design and maintenance features such as the replaceable side filter and top lamp, make the projector easy to install and maintain.

This new projector has been designed to be an ecologically conscious. The intelligent power management system reduces the lamp power to the exact required level of brightness depending on the content displayed. Other than in scenes where full brightness is required, the lamp intelligently determines the power output by analyzing more than 3 billion different image patterns. This reduces the main power consumption by as much as 10 percent when the dynamic iris function is in operation.

The Panasonic PT-AE4000 LCD home cinema projector will be available from the end of October 2009 at authorized dealers.

[Stuart Wright]

Please discuss the projector in our discussion thread here.