Finally plugged it in and watched for a long evening. Did a lot of channel surfing and played in the menu. Edit: After a couple of nights of watching a lot of different things, for a long time:
Replaced an AE2000 with about 1800 hours on the bulb/projector.
Watching it on a High Power (133" diag.) in a totally light controlled room.
Set on low lamp it is a fair amount brighter than the 2000 was on the normal/high lamp.
Contrast is obviously better and that really stuck out on "El Dorado" which is probably Technicolor, but shot very brightly. Some folks might think it has too much contrast given what they are familiar with, but I have no doubt I will get used to it.
Yep, already used to it. After a couple of days I have seen so much new detail that it is actually a little distracting sometimes.
Color 1 seemed best at first, but I have decided Cinema 1 is a more realistic. I looked again at the Evan Powell review and compared them. The color seems more vivid than on the 2000. Not over-saturated, and apparently quite accurate, but certainly noticeable.
At first, in the first few minutes, I thought I saw the dynamic iris pumping. So I turned it off. Hours later, I turned it back on and couldn't see it. Maybe it just had to get "warmed up" or "loosened up." Haven't noticed it again after probably 30 hours of viewing. It might have been the bulb's arc hopping around to find a sweet spot. Who knows.
The frame interpolation adjustment is a hoot. Put it on 3 and it is absolutely scary weird on the clearest material, like Technicolor movies on the best HD channels. It's like you jumped into the actor's environment with them. You feel like you are intruding. In that mode it is extremely 3-D (eerily so) but yes, it looks just like an HD Video Camera took the video, which really looks odd on movies from the 50's since you've never seen those scenes shot like that. It's not "film-like" at all and very distracting but extraordinarily realistic in an odd way. We laughed a lot. On some material 2 is acceptable, but not very often. 1 seemed OK for pretty much everything, and you can forget it's working but if you watch for it you can still see a little of the 3D effect, but it certainly isn't objectionable and maybe superior. 1 and 2 really smooth out the pans, it just depends on what your "creepy" threshold is. I did finally notice the voice delay on 2 and 3. My setup runs 1 ms delayed normally, which matches the off and 1 settings. Setting 3 requires 4 ms.
So, overall, is there a night and day difference between the 2000 and the 4000. Close call, but probably not. But as you continue watching material you have seen before, more and more clarity jumps out at you. I'm expecting that phenomenon to disappear after a while so I won't get so distracted by it. If you don't get the 4000 and stick with your 2000 or 3000, you'll never miss it. But if you upgrade, you will be extremely happy with how it looks and you will see a lot of subtle differences that add up. I suppose some will always think any difference or improvement they see is earth shattering, and I'm still not one of those. I can clearly see several improvements now, which I am pretty surprised by, because I didn't feel like I was really missing anything that affected my viewing pleasure before. I'm glad I did it now.