Well I just received my TW700 today. Very pleased with the purchase process. Set it up tonight and ran it through a quick couple paces. Popped in DVE to check for VB, stuck pixels, or color shift. Everything, thankfully, was spot on. Didn't bother calibrating tonight. These are the things I noticed over my recently sold AE900.

This is in a dedicated theater room (read dark), projecting on a home made 96" do-all screen (guessing about 1.2 gain). PJ set on a shelf for now at about 20' from screen.

Let's start out with the bad. It's an import so it's freaking white. Definitely stands out in a black theater room. It's also much larger than my 900, but is much sexier looking (if you can call a pj sexy, lol). That's about it. Oh yeah, the remote is hideous, not a big deal seeing as the MX850 is running everything.

Now on to the better points, from an operational stand point. The user menu has a lot more tweaker features. This thing has the longest throw range of anything I have seen. Even though I would have liked to have seen an electric lens shift, this one is much easier to operate than the Panny. The joystick was impossible to get lined up perfectly. I also like the fact when you shut off a DVD player the screen goes black. My Panny was blinding blue. Maybe it had the same feature and I never found it. OK enough of the boring stuff. :D

First movie King Kong (HDDVD). Shadow detail is greatly improved over the 900. Flesh tones were spot on out of the box. With the Panny I could never get to a point where I was satisfied. Colors seemed much more natural where the Panny always seemed a little over saturated. Contrast seems to be a lot better now, the extra lumens are definitely noticed. Black level is head and shoulders above the Panny. I didn't realize how bad the 900 was until seeing the 700 in action. Black bars disappear into the movie now. I can't tell a difference between them and the black parts of the movie. I am seeing a 3d quality to the movie I never noticed before. I can't say I am picking up more detail, just more depth. I have mentioned about having to refocus the Panny all the time because I thought the image seemed soft. I am now seeing why. This picture is very sharp, not quite Z4/5 sharp but dang close. This pj also exhibits a ton less noise. The background shots with the 900 were littered with digital noise, it is all but gone now. In low lamp mode the 700 is very quiet. I would say 20% quieter than my 900 (this could be skewed as the 900 was mounted overhead whereas the 700 right now is 6' behind me).

OK on to the point I'm sure everyone is wanting to hear. SDE. I have pretty good eyesight. I was 20/10 last year but I'm probably not quite as good now but still better than most. I am very susceptible to SDE. The Z4 drove me nuts. I am sitting at 1.57 screen widths. PJ is focused as sharp as I can get it, no backing off at all. On an HD movie (which is my primary media), I can rarely see SDE present. Some colors seem to exhibit it a little more and of course very bright white scenes it tends to show. This was looking for it the whole movie. After 45 minutes of skipping around KK I don't think I picked up one scene. On Tokyo Drift I caught a couple scenes which showed minor SDE but once again I was definitely looking for it. I absolutely hate SDE and this was very tolerable to me. I don't think I would even bother de focusing the pj for it. I would take this over Panny's SS any day.

Well these are my initial impressions. Like I said there was no calibration done, not even a DVE run. I am no expert and don't have a ton of Pj's to compare to, just my impressions at face value. :rolleyes:

You should not have to tweak much, this is supposed to have ISF Calibration already. Maybe one of the pros will chime in here to let you know how good it really is out of the box.

From what I understand only the US version was calibrated. I still don't understand the reasoning behind factory calibrating anyways. Unless the factory has the exact same setup as me it's kind of a useless point.

Can you please see if your unit has some panel missaligment problems when looking from really close. Here is a link for my post of the problem I'm having in my unit whit some pictures:

Misconvergence problem (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=9836160&&#post9836160)

Other than this problem that i have, I'm also very happy with TW700 :)

When I get home from work tonight I'll check. I know my 900 exhibited some pretty bad mis alignment. It was easily noticable from about 5'. I expect to see some, as that is the nature of the beast.

I just got mine yesterday and used it for only about an hour last night. I am very impressed by this unit! I've owned many projector/screen combinations over the years including a stupid expensive Marantz DLP and an AX100U for about a monthand a Z4.

What I didn't like about the Panasonic was the digital noise in the picture and the softness. I found myself focusing over and over again thinking it was not sharp enough. The Epson is nice and sharp, bright and has VERY little digital noise. Much better blacks than the Panasonic, too. I'm using a 159" HI Power screen sitting 17 feet away. The projector is 21 feet from the screen on a shelf 7" up.
I can't wait to see it calibrated!