Consolidated AE700 thread- Ban is lifted - Page 151

Since it is CYAN this would involve the Blue and Green primaries. IT could be dust. Have you viewed the individual channels or tried to focus the "blob"?


The polarizers usually don't become an issue till about 2K+ hours on the unit unless you've been running hot. It is better to use the SHUTTER when the pj is on but not being used for viewing to avoid image retention - particularly noticeable with the BLUE channel.

The 1080P LCDs are D6 based, which are inorganic so you would not face the same issues as far as degradation. Not to say that something else won't go wrong. ;-)

kinda nice to drop into the old meeting place and see a familiar name.
ted

tvted
thanks for the attention. I have opened and cleaned it out after the blobs started and ruled out the dust blobs. Im pretty sure its the polarizers. It has well over 3000 hours and started going off with the cyan "areas" around 2000 hrs before I tried changing bulbs. I run it conservative and its over 15" from the ceiling, and well away from the rear wall. I'll have to recheck the individual channels as I don't remember checking. I probably did, but in any case various window patterns, ramps, steps etc, all have the blobs. I did have it all apart seeing if I thought I could do the polarizer change myself, but decided that it is probably not worth it. It looks nothing like IR afaics.
I am interested in the inorganic panels but what about different, better bulbs as well? I fear I have to get back to "dual tv's" - pj for movie night and a tv for regular viewing. The problem is that regular viewing has to be HD and good. Having both gets pricey.
Anyway, sorry, venting, frustrated - good to see you still drop by.

I've been using component video to drive my AE700 for the last year+ and it's OK but there is definitely a little ringing in the lines. I was waiting for the prices of long HDMI cables to come down into the sane region and I picked a 20m cable up the other day. I just hooked it up to my Scientific Atlanta HD-PVR which has HDMI output but the picture is a littlesnowy and every few seconds there is a flash of a 1/2 of a screen of nothing but snow. Looks like the HDMI input to the AE700 doesn't have HDMI EQ?

Has anyone else had similar problems? WOuld an HDMI equalizer fix it? I don't want to drop $100 on it unless it will actually fix the problem.

Otherwise I'm reasonably happy with the 700. I do see a little VB, not much screen door (unless you get right up to the screen) but there is definitely some registration problems. Especially in the lower left corner. The red channel is definitely off but in reading this forum there is no adjustment for registration for this projector.

Hi,
Im new to the projector world and had a couple questions about the AE700.

First, is it still worth buying? I have a chance to pick one up for $625 that comes with ~50ft of component cable ($120) and a mount from VisualApex ($190). The pj has about 580 hours of lamp usage.

Also, am I ok to project this directly onto the wall or do I need a screen? My walls are white, not super-smooth, but I will be about 15ft away from the wall if that makes a difference.

Finally, what is the best distance to mount this pj at? My ceilings are ~9ft. The room size is 15ft.

Thanks!

Hey guys, I too was offered to buy a very lightly used AE700 for $650 from someone. I've been pretty well set on getting a Sanyo PLV-Z5, but perhaps I'd be better off using this as a temp 720p projector until more 1080p projectors come down in price..


Any suggestions, input?

The prices you guys mention sound good to me. Yes, this is STILL a fantastic projector with a fantastic picture. The problem is that a lot of people have had problems with their unit (myself included) involving repairs (specifically the p-module) and a bunch of people have also complained about short lamp life and the lamps are expensive ($300?). I have NO idea what % of these projectors had or will have the p-module failure though, maybe its small - the repair is pretty easy to do yourself and costs about $125 although mine failed a second time just a day after the first fix, its working now but I have no idea for how long. If I thought I could get 2-3 years use out of it, I'd probably buy one today for around $600 though.

p.s. Projecting onto a white wall will probably work just fine. You can also buy a cheap ($10) piece of hardboard (4x8) from home depot and paint it with killz 2 primer which makes for a very good screen by itself (you can find more complex screen paint solutions detailed in the AVS forums with a little searching, but really, killz2 works great, is inexpensive, and easy to do).

p.p.s. You asked about best distance - the closer to the screen, the better, and the more centered on your screen, the better. You can get a brighter image by moving it closer, and less distortion if you project dead ahead without using lens shifting. Of course everything is a compromise, you don't want people straining their necks looking UP at a screen, and you don't want the projector mounted somewhere that people will be bumping their head on it. Don't worry about having to use a little lens shift.

Ive got a seperate thread on this, but this is probably better- although this thread is pretty stinkin huge!

Has anyone hooked this PJ to a da-lite screen (ive got a cosmo/electrol) - it says with a 12v or 5v trigger I can do this? Do I still wire it to the toggle switch or is that optional at that time.

Also, with a 106" HD screen, it says its like 52" tall, is this measuring only the white part? Then I need to add the black frame, the black pole at the bottom, plus any additional length for the chain/rope that holds the screen into the unit? Trying to get total height to see if I need to mount this into my ceiling.

TIA
Ross

Hey, I'm reviving a rather old thread to ask a really dumb question...Any of you AE700 owners still out there? I got mine nearly three years ago (around Dec, 2004) and never shipped mine out to upgrade the firmware. I think I remember reading that there were some issues with HDMI that the firmware upgrade fixed. Sorry, I'd rather not have to dig through a 151 page thread, so please have mercy on me.

Anyways, I moved into a new house about 9 months ago and still haven't hooked up my projector yet (due to room layout issues that I've been hemming and hawing over). While trying to figure out where best to mount my AE700, I bought a 50" plasma and have been living with that. I also recently got an HD DVD player and am anxious to get my projector hooked up again. I'm wondering if I need to ship my projector out to upgrade the firmware. What was/is the issue with HDMI?

Hello old AE700 user!

Mine is now soon 3 years old too. I just passed 2000 hours with no problems at all. How many hours do you have on yours?

I think it was 2 problems with the firmware regarding to the HDMI input.

1. The the black screen issue. Happends 1 time each hour i think? Something to do with the hdcp encryption. (Copy protection signal). Each hour it gets this signal the AE700 gets out of sync for a couple of seconds.

2. If you use PC you wil see that you miss some lines at the top and the bottom. I think it was 8 lines missing. Cropping i believe. Is't like if you see the start at the bottom, the letters are cut off a little. This problem is the same at dvd/ hd dvd. But you wont notice it as much as on your desktop.

Hope this helps.

I'm also a longtime AE700 user. Yea, the cropping thing never made any sense to me, you are supposedly sending the projector a perfect digital native resolution and it crops - how can that be? Where do the extra lines go and what lines get stretched to fill the screen? I haven't read this whole thread either so I don't know if these questions were ever answered but as far as I know the problem was never fixed by panasonic, so it won't be resolved by sending your unit in for a firmware upgrade (but I could be wrong - if you find out otherwise let me know!).

I don't use HDMI because of the cropping issue even though my HTPC has HDMI output and I have already strung the HDMI cable to the projector. I had to send my unit in for repair a few months ago (details are in another thread) and I believe they upgraded the firmware, but I must confess I haven't bothered to try the HDMI since I got it back.

So if I want to push a 720p signal to it (from an HD cable box or HD DVD player), is my best choice still the component connection?

exsodius, I'm not sure how many hours I've got. I'll have to get back to you on that. I suspect you'll be jealous, though. It's been in a box for the last 9 months and back when it was in use, I only used it on a couple of occasions for HDTV. Most of the time it was used for DVDs and I didn't even use it for that as much as I should have (for various reasons - cumbersomeness of moving my standard-def TV out of the way, non-light-controlled room so it had to be at night, and my wife often wanting to watch non-action movies on the bedroom TV).

LOL

"and my wife often wanting to watch non-action movies on the bedroom TV"

Ditto on that.

Yes i am jealous on your little lamp usage!

Now i remember!

Projector gets 750p lines on the input. But the panel is only 720 lines. So i was wrong about 8 lines missing. It is 30 lines missing, 15 at top and 15 at bottom. Too bad for us. I also bought a 10 meter HDMI cable, and returned it because of this cropping. Picture was slightly sharper than my pc vga input.

Panasonic rules anyway!

So what are you AE700 holdouts planning on upgrading to? My unit is about 2.5 years old and I've put a little over 3k hours on it. The AX200 sounds quite nice, but does it pay to upgrade to another 720p unit when affordable 1080p is just around the corner? I'm keeping my eye on the AE2000, as it should also be plenty bright with 1500 lumens.

I have about 2500 hours on my AE700 and also am looking at the AE2000. My concern is that on my 700 the blue polarizer has been going bad for some time now. Lots of blue/green spots (not dust) on the left third of the screen. Don't want that problem to crop up again so I am a little gun shy of LCD. Waiting to see if anyone had similar problems with AE1000.

Stace

I got a new bulb, so I'm not going to upgrade until the old bulb and the new bulb are completely dead (explode if they must ) I guess if they have HD-DVD at 1080p I'll get a 1080p projector when that time comes. I'm very happy with the ae700 for the time being, although just last week I noticed a slight bluish tint showing up in the middle of the screen - no idea what that means, I'm hoping its not that the project is on its way to the landfill as I just paid to repair the thing a few months ago...

As for best way to connect it - I think VGA is best, then component, and I guess HDMI if you don't mind the cropping (I'm sure its fine for movies, not so good as a PC desktop).

My panasonic 700 is still going strong with 3500 hrs. on the bulb. I better get the full 5000 hrs. that they said i would . Go panasonic.

I too have started noticing a slight discoloration at the left edge of the screen...but it's really only visable on an all white image (hockey games mostly) Not too bad yet, and unless it gets much worse I can live with it. Other than that I'm really still satisfied for the most part with my AE700, and may hang on to it for one more year and upgrade next fall. By that time there should be some serious competition in the 1080p arena, with several selling for below 2k.

Unless I'm mistaken, don't the new models use inorganic LCD panels? They are supposedly not prone to this problem. If so, it shouldn't be an issue on the AE2000.

Who said you would get 5000 hours on your bulb? The spec calls for 2k at high power and 3k on low. You should consider yourself lucky to have gotten 3500 hours on yours. Mine became quite dim at around 2500 (on low power) and I purchased a slightly used replacement lamp from a forum member to hold me over.

Hi all,

I have an AE700 which I've been using over straight VGA for three years now. No problems, works like a charm at mode "Wide720". I use a standard PC running Fedora Linux with MythTV to watch TV on the PJ.

Now, I want to discard the VGA cable and upgrade to HDMI, so I plugged in an HDMI cable into the AE700 and the DVI port of an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 card.
Funnily, whatever I do, I cannot get the desired mode, "750/50p", all the projector seems to be recognizing is "1125/50i". The PC then seems to think that a resolution of 1920x540 is fine. No matter what I do I cannot get the desired resolution. I've trawled the net for info and modelines to get this to work, but no luck.

Does anybody know what is going on here? I thought HDMI would be plug and play...

Any help is appreciated.


Cheers,



-Morten

I had a similar problem. It seems the Nvidia card detects the max resolution the projector can handle and outputs that.

Here is what I did to fix it:

• Right mouse click on the Desktop and choose 'Properties'
• Click the 'Settings' Tab and press the 'Advanced' button
• I had a 'GeForce 8400 GS' tab, click on that and then click the 'Start NVIDIA control Panel' button
• On the left hand side under the 'Video & Television' list is an entry for 'Change the signal or HD format' click on that
• Now on the right will be a list of supported signals eg 1080p, 1080i, 720p,576p
• Select your preffered signal and then press the 'Apply' button
• Now reboot and the output should now be 720p or whatever you selected.

You might need to update your drivers to get the same settings in your control panel. If you don't get the same settings, then your card might not support it.

Good luck.

Just curious, when you guys compare VGA to DVI on this projector what is your conclusion? Everytime I try it, I end up going back to VGA after a couple days. I think HDMI is a downgrade with this projector (obviously would not be a downgrade with other projectors). You don't get 1 to 1 pixel mapping, and you do get some strange artificial sharpening type look that I can't stand (even when the projector's sharpness setting is turned all the way down). This projector can't display its own native resolution over the HDMI input for whatever crazy reason, and as far as I know, that problem was never corrected in any firmware updates...

Obviously I am a little late to this party but i just hooked mine up with a 20 ft HDMI cable and I am getting about 1 1/2 inches of black bars on the top and bottom of the screen when watching a dvd.
It is actually the movie being cut off because the HDMI blue screen fills the whole screen.
No problem with component or s video cables, only HDMI.

doctorq are you sure that you are not running a 2.35:1 ratio DVD as opposed to a 16:9 one? Try one that you know is 16:9
Mike

yes, let me add that it is 16:9 movie and fills screen on component or s-video inputs

doctorq OK, are you playing the DVD from a set top unit, computer or something else. Have your tried another DVD, if so do you get the same results, Is the the pj 'squeezing' the picture to fit the 'new screen format' or cropping off the top and bottom parts of the picture. Can you do a test by placing the pj closer, about 6 feet, from the screen, using a shorter HDMO cable.
I have a AE500 pj that changed the position of the image by about 3/4 of an inch when using an HDMI converted to a DVI connection. When I used s-video or component this did not happen. (Something to do with the differences between a digital and analog input signal, perhaps the HDMI to DVI adapter). At the time I asked a lot of people in this forum what to do and they all said, use a DVI/HDMI connection only and reposition the pj. Thats what I did, 4 years ago, so far so good.
Mike

yes I could zoom the lens to do that, but then the sides go off the screen since the bars are only on the top and bottom.