Panny AE100 & iScan best bet?

R

reefer

Guest
Hello all,

Looking to buy a new projector but still deciding so shootouts like at AV-Sales are good news for gathering opinions. Thanks to all those involved. I`m sure its appreciated all round.

My main question is as I`m looking at buying the Panny AE100 now at about £1220, along with maybe the iScan Pro at £650 this would equate to £1870 all in. I already have a sony dvd with component out and have a pioneer 925 laser disc & collection, so would this be my best bet at this price with regards to the peoples views between the various projectors?

Would a DLP be better? :rolleyes: If so which one around that price? Are rainbows that noticeable? Am I better building a HCPC? (don`t fancy that)

Any views appreciated.;)
 
A DLP such as the Plus V-807 that someone mentioned in an earlier thread may be better due to the greater contrast ratio and better black level, but it's a few hundred pounds more.

You may suffer from the Rainbow effect, so make sure you demo either type of pj before you buy. (Dead pixels occur in LCD pjs).

Best and cheapest source for the AE100 is an htpc - you can even run your lazerdisk through it via a PCTV Rave (or simialr) capture card using DScaler. You can build a htpc for around £300 which'll work fine for this pj.

Htpc isn't the easiest thing to set-up if you're not used to fiddling with sofware etc, and isn't always that user friendly.

Go over to www.avsforum.com and do a search for the AE100 and a guy call Li On (IIRC) who extensively tested this pj with telling results.

HTH

Gary.
 
I am also interested in the iscan and the AE100 as they can be connected via the VGA port which offers the best picture quality with the AE100, the only snag is I dont think you will get true progressive pal (625p) with the iscan plugged in this way, it would be scaled and you will not be getting the best image out of it, as said before you must get the Ae100 to show wide480 in the menu to get the best from it, I dont think you will get this with pal saurces with the iscan, and the only way to get wide480 is from a HTPC.
It would still be interesting to know how good the image is from the iscan when projecting from Sky and Video, I watch Sky quite frequently on my AE100 and find the picture quality quite poor in composite, the only way to improve at the momant would be to go for a RGB/Componant convertor, which should soon be available from www.rgbtosvideo.com or you could go the HTPC route with a tv card which has composite and s-video imputs.
 
Tim, how are you finding the progressive scan of your Toshiba into the component of the Panasonic, now you have had it running for a while.
Be interesting to see how it compares to Iscan Pro via the vga port.
best regards
LittleT2
 
Originally posted by LittleT2
Tim, how are you finding the progressive scan of your Toshiba into the component of the Panasonic, now you have had it running for a while.

There is a big jump in picture quality, much more film like, I can still see some video proccessing, on sky scenes, but using -2 keystone doesn't help, for example, on SWE1 (r1) when they first arrive on Tattoine, the picture looks to have a lot of proccessing going on, I need to watch this scene without using keystone, I will also try the same scene from my PC, into the VGA port.
 
"for example, on SWE1 (r1) when they first arrive on Tattoine, the picture looks to have a lot of proccessing going on, I need to watch this scene without using keystone, I will also try the same scene from my PC, into the VGA port."

Is that the scene where the huge spaceships land in the forest (before Jar-Jar)?

If so, I can't say I notice any processing as such (using htpc), but the R1 version of this film has some horrendous edge enhancement in it.

Gives everything a terrible halo... :(
 
Is that the scene where the huge spaceships land in the forest (before Jar-Jar)?
No, thats Naboo.
The scene I am talking about is on the desert planet when they first land in the Silver ship.
 
Aaahhhhh - *that's* Naboo!

Been a while since I was there.. :)

I'll have to have a look at the scene you mention know and see how it looks (curiosity).

I remember the other scene cos of the EE - I thought my pc was playing up...

Gary.
 
I have now done the Tatoine test chapter13 onwards, the ship lands and then you get some good desert shots.
After setting keystone back to zero I found the picture did not improve, some video proccessing was still visible even with progressive scan, I then switched to my PC to test the VGA imput on the AE100 with the same scene, the scene was very jerky because I only have a AMD K6 333 proccessor, but immedietly the image looked very clean and free of any processing, I cannot wait to see how good it looks when using a processor which is capable of running dvd software playback smoothly.
 
Hi Tim,

I'm only using a 950 Duron and 128meg of ram in my htpc and there's no jerkiness at all, so you won't have to lay out a great deal of money to upgrade.

I got myself a cheap ECS K7S5A motherboard which only costs £50 from ebuyer.com, and the 950 will set you back around £35 so you can easily upgrade for less than £100. If you want it quiet, get a socket a radial fin fan from quietpc.com (£20+vat and postage) and replace the PSU fan with a quiet 80mm fan from quietpc (£14+vat).

I'm using a Radeon (also from ebuyer - a Supergrace model) and the image quality is excellent using the ATI player 5. WinDVD is pretty good too, but image quality isn't as rich. Try using Zoomplayer combining the ATI video with WinDVD audio for best results (IMHO).

Gary.
 
All these posts are helping me out cheers :p

My current setup is a Eclipse 370 CRT projector with LC 7" tubes & some upgraded delta-tac 4 lenses, sony 725 dvd player multiregion (watched (pal) shrek last night & it still seems I can see lip sync probs is this normal?) via rgb to the projector. Pioneer laserdisc collection (I`ve been into this for years befor dvd was even born :D )

We have a new amd pc 1800xp fingy... would I be better using this then to maybe the Panny ae100... I wanna check the picture from the lcd pj`s so maybe I`ll find a demo in Preston this saturday with luck. Are there any good demo places for pj`s around liverpool/preston way (live inbetween)?

want to see if the rainbow thing bothers me on DLP too.

Thanks for all this info anyway, this bb is very helpful,
cheers.
 
Gary

What cheap 5.1 soundcard would you recommend?
Thanks for the tips, they are printing of this very minute :)
 
Hi Tim,

The Soundblaster 4.1 can do 5.1 DD/DTS pass through and is around £24 from ebuyer.com.

I've got one in my desktop pc, and someone here mentioned they had one and was using it successfully for their HTPC.

I'm using an Aureal SQ1500 which was about £18 including postage from the USA. If you can get one (no longer made) it should work fine - it's what I'm using in my WinMe htpc at the moment.

HTH

Gary.
 

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