I am planning my projector/screen installation and one option (which I seems to like most) involves placing PJ off center of the screen. I am planning to get Panasonic AE-2000U that allows horizontal shift up to 40% of the screen size. In this installation I would shift it about 30%. It is well within specs for AU2000, however I am wondering if I should expect any image degradation using this shift compare with centered setup. Thanks.

P.S. In this installation the vertical shift will be rather small ~30-40% (the maximum for AE-2000 is 100%).

Is there a trade off between installation convenience and performance?
Frequently yes. Ceiling mount is nice but a "shelf behind" offers better performance.

Many of the DLP projectors are not very offset flexible but then usually earn points for clarity.

It's a similar situation with DSLR camera lens. Prime (fixed focal length) lens are the best optically, but a lot of zooms are still sold.

I mount my projector with zero offsets and set the zoom about half-way. The also works great with optimizing the Da-Lite High Power screen gain angles.

Lastly consider the reduced light output due to zooming, especially with this light challenged Panasonic.

I've been trying to get answers to this question too. From what I gather, there is some image degradation by using horizontal lens shift, especially with an anamorphic lens on the front (geometry is apparently harder to set properly when horizontal lens shift is used).

I used a bit of horizontal lens shift on my sony vw60. Very tedious to do. I have no idea what the default position would be since it isn't marked. I'm sure it could be found by projecting onto a flat surface with markings.

Bottom line is that I was able to get a pretty good result with a little bit of overscan for the geometry errors (I'm using a prismasonic lens) and just a little horizontal lens shift.

Maybe with a 2.35 screen... Any image degredation seems to only happen at the most extreme edge of any given directional shift, so generally there are no issues with this.

Thanks for all responses. May be I should be just a bit more specific. I have 2 options how to install PJ (AE-2000U):

1) Right under the seiling, ~17' from 92" 16:9 screen. In this case I can make horizontal offset close to zero but vertical offset will be ~60-70% (max is 100%).
2) At the bookshelf, ~17' from 92" 16:9 screen. In this case I have to set horizontal offset ~30% (max is 40%) but vertical offset will be ~20-30% (max is 100%).

Since projector is far from the screen and the screen is rather small, in both scenario I will use very small zoom ~1.1x.
Not sure if AE-2000U comes with anamorphic lens or not.

I'd like to get Dalite HP screen. However, it will work bad with setup (1), since projector would be about 5' above my head. It should work much better with option (2) since PJ will be just 1-1.5' feets right from my head at about the same level. So, I like the 2d setup but I am a bit concern if the horizontal lense shift makes more negative impact on the image quality vs the vertical one.