Picture details

While fine detail is evident during Spiderman 3 on Blu-ray we found that the trickier textures of the Sandman were not quite as obvious as they are with some rival projectors. However, the recent broadcasts of Swarm and Survivors on the BBC HD channel were in the 'so-real-you-could-touch-it' class, while noise (more of a problem with broadcasts than Blu-ray) was kept at bay.

During the test, we accidentally discovered that the Southend vs. Chelsea FA Cup replay was being carried by the sporadic ITV HD channel. During the broadcast you could easily make out individual faces among the supporters and even blades of grass on the pitch.

Colours are lucid yet natural, although calibration is needed to bring out the best in them. We suspect that only those at Roots Hall that evening saw the grass any better. Given that the AE3000 is a LCD projector, there's none of the rainbow effect that can affect competing single-chip DLPs.

Shadow detail is excellent, recognisable elements being rendered from scenes that another projector reproduced as a featureless dark grey. But while black levels are strong, competing lightboxes such as JVC's recent models reach deeper. Furthermore, the AE3000 doesn't yield the world's brightest picture, although this isn't really objectionable in sensibly designed viewing rooms.

Auto-iris systems tend to shift black-level noticeably according to picture content. Panasonic's implementation proved clearly superior to some we've seen before, but it's not totally impervious to this 'hunting'; for that reason, we preferred to turn it off.

Fed from Blu-ray and SkyHD, the AE3000 was found to handle movement devoid of judder. DVDs and digital TV benefited from sympathetic portrayal of colours, wide contrast range and depth. What a pity, then, that the projector won't handle interlaced standard-def sources via HDMI where Panasonic technology usually performs so very well.

Value for money

The Panasonic AE3000 can be summed up as a good all-rounder; to get noticeably better, you would need to spend a lot more money. Pictures can be truly gob-smacking in their scale and intensity, although for best results careful attention must be paid to adjustment (at the very least, employ a calibration disc such as Digital Video Essentials).

Connectivity and configurability, meanwhile, are both first-rate, and indeed some far more expensive devices are inferior to the AE3000 in this respect.