AE500 vs Sanyo Z2 - talking money

Guys
Well, after about 12 months of "desire" and looking I am about to lay down the cash for one of the above projectors.

Now all you purists without 2 kids, wife, mortgage etc. will be choosing on the basis of colour saturation, hues etc.

For me it is a matter of money.
The best price I see for the Ae500 is £1050 on Komplett.co.uk
The best price I see for the Z2 is £1220 on ivojo.co.uk

I am projecting from a PC and will do the 1:1 pixel matching. Because of the constraints of the room I have to offset the image slightly from vertical. I have heard that only the Sanyo can offset the image optically. If I have to use keystone correction (like with the Panasonic) I will be losing the 1:1 matching of my pixels and therefore much of the benefit of 1280 resolution.

This tells me I have to go for the Sanyo and pay an extra £170.

Is this true?
Are these projectors cheaper elsewhere?

 

Sorry I cant offer you any advice, but I would love to hear peoples views on this. I had planned on buying the AE500, but with the Z2 this low in price (i'd only seen it at about £1600) its made me wonder???

Cheers

 

I have Mrs Ritz, two kids and a mortgage and would still rather pick the projector which gave me the image I liked best as opposed to fretting about £150 ish price differential. Have you seen either (preferrably both) of these projectors in a decent demo ? Experience here shows that it's unwise to make a choice based purely on the lowest price without making sure you're happy with the image.

The benefit of 1280x720 pixels is reduced appearance of screendoor, 1:1 pixel matching has nothing to do with it. 1:1 pixel matching will give you a very much improved image performance, even if you have to use a little keystone to locate the image in your set-up.

See the projectors first............................ the difference between the costs of the two projectors is about 10% of the price..... you could expect to have the PJ depreciate substantially over a three year period, it amounts to £1 per week. Did I say See the projectors first ?


Sean.

 

You really need to demo them both and make your own decision I am afraid. A few points I would make that influenced me. Just my opinions before I get lynched.

ae 500 has soft screen technology, which helps reduce screen door. Some people like this, some don’t. Personally I like it. I can’t see any on mine some people have seen it on their Panny projectors, I don’t know about that.

These projectors are very evenly matched if you read the numerous reviews.

I haven’t got mine properly set-up yet but have had a good play with it. I have played with Keystone. People says it has a massive effect on picture quality. Personally, I don’t see it but then again I won’t really be using Keystone.

The Sanyo has the lens shift function which will allow you to offset the projector and this is certainly a useful feature. I did not buy the Sanyo, not because of the price difference although £200 saving is quite a bit at this level of projector but because I was concerned about dust ingress on the Z2 having seen numerous people complain about this.

But this seems to effect pretty much all of the LCD projectors to one extent or another including the ae500 (You can see this if you have a look through these forums)

As I said you really need to look at them both and decide.

 

I have the Z2 and the thing that sold it to me over the pioneer, well two things really one it was available in the uk before the pioneer and two was the lens shift function, it really does make setting the thing up so easy. There are issues with dust which is unacceptable but once it is set up if you dont need to move it then that should reduce the dust issue, i think.