Panasonic PT-AE3000 Full HD projector has split personality

Treat your home cinema to new Full HD projector
Treat your home cinema to new Full HD projector

You're sure that your new High Definition Panasonic LCD projector is the veritable bee's leg joints, but how to convince your other half that the $3500 (£2000) you've just splashed out is worth sacrificing that Caribbean holiday for?

Simple. Just fire it up and activate Split Adjust mode to divide the screen into two. One half shows boring old vanilla 1080p Full HD signals, while the other highlights the cutting edge adjustments the PT-AE3000 is capable of: pin-sharp 120Hz images thanks to its Frame Creation technology; 21:9 cinema-format widescreen; and a Detail Clarity Processor V2.0 thats extracts the most detail from low, mid, high, and even the super-high frequency components.

Face it, you're going to be sleeping on the sofa

If that doesn't convince her, it's time to step it up a notch and deploy the Panasonic's waveform monitor. This widget, seen mostly on professional video and film equipment, measures the level of brightness from a given video signal source, automatically verifies that the source is outputting at full dynamic range, and quickly makes adjustments to optimize it for your home cinema.

The PT-AE3000 projector also boasts 1,600 lumen brightness and a powerful 60,000:1 contrast ratio, together with three HDMI 1.3 inputs that are all Deep Color and x.v.Color compliant. As a last resort, you could also mention that the projector uses just 0.08W in standby mode, a best in class performance that might save you, oh, two or three quid a year over a more wasteful device.

The Panasonic PT-AE3000 is available, in the USA initially, from October.

Mark Harris is Senior Research Director at Gartner.