Panasonic PT

Fancy filling your domicile with eye-melting, brain-exploding, high-definition 3D, but for some reason hate televisions? Then Panasonic’s PT-AT5000E might be for you. It’s an LCD projector that spits out 1080p HD video, but it’s also capable of firing a 3D picture onto your living room wall. That’s three kinds of D!

This potent projector offers a 300,000:1 contrast ratio and 2,000 lumens of brightness. Happily, you can adjust the 3D effect, and the PT-AT5000E is capable of converting boring old 2D video into 3D.

We’ve never found this sort of conversion feature to work particularly well, though — often perfectly pleasant 2D scenes are turned into lumpen, cardboard-cut-out monstrosities. Fingers crossed the weird robot algorithms employed in this projector are slightly better than usual.

The projector comes with a built-in infrared transmitter for communicating with the active-shutter specs you’ll need to see the 3D effect. The glasses are sold separately, but, if you’ve got a Panasonic Viera 3D telly, the same goggles that work with that will also work with this projector. We would question, though, why you’d need both a 3D projector and telly — it’s possible to have too much 3D tech, you know.

Also available is an optional infrared transmitter for extending the transmission distance, and the PT-AT5000E comes loaded with three HDMI inputs. There’s no word on pricing yet, but What Hi-Fi? reckons it’ll retail for perhaps a little under £3,000. Ouch.

What we really want is a projector that shoots out holograms, like that one in Minority Report or the one inside R2-D2. But, seeing as we could be waiting for a while, the PT-AT5000E could hold our attention in the meantime.

Would you be interested in a 3D projector? Or do you think 3D is a despicable gimmick? Let us know in the comments section below, or on our Facebook wall.

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Panasonic PT

With next-generation devices like Samsung’s BD-P1000 Blu-ray player (reviewed here), Toshiba’s HD-E1 and HD-XE1 HD DVD players and Sony’s PlayStation 3 (previewed here) moving from prototype to product, television buyers have been eyeing up ‘Full HD’ screens that support 1080p, the smoothest and most detailed of the hi-def signals. Equivalent projectors, however, seem to have been overlooked by all but the most hardcore enthusiasts.

This is probably due to the lack of dedicated demonstration rooms to let you find out what you’re missing. But as any film buff will tell you, nothing comes closer to a cinematic experience than watching your favourite flick on a super-sized screen. For the same price as a 50-inch plasma or LCD (£3,500), Panasonic’s latest PT-AE1000E can display a full 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution image up to 100 inches in size from only 3m away. If size matters, do the maths.

Unusually at this level, the projector relies on LCD technology, featuring Panasonic’s heavily praised C2Fine LCD panel. The biggest criticism of LCD projectors is that they’re susceptible to the so-called ‘chickenwire effect’, a visible lattice superimposed on the screen from the LCD panel. Panasonic claims to have eliminated this problem using its Smooth Screen technology, which reduces the gaps between pixels to remove the lines.

There’s other advanced technology to hand too, including the latest Cinema Works Pro engine with a 14-bit processing circuit and the Dynamic Iris system. This analyses the brightness levels of each image and adjusts the power lamp, iris and gamma curve accordingly.

Panasonic claims a class-leading contrast ratio of 11,000:1, although a brightness rating of 1,100 Lumens means you’ll need a dedicated, darkened room to provoke the best performance. Connectivity is also impressive with dual HDMI and component inputs, and even a Scart terminal for standard-definition uses.

The PT-AE1000E will be available from mid-November. -RA

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