Panny AE900 Official Thread- Please post here!

Come on sportrac! We're waiting for some first impressions.

Yeah, some of us are shopping even as we speak!

My projector arrived today. Unfortunately I have to wait until this evening to fire it up when it is dark in my place (not to mention that I'm still at work!). I'll post a few first impressions and then go watch a movie

Does anybody know how to get into the service menus? How was this done on the AE700? I don't remember...

Advanced option page in the user menu, then hold the enter key on the first choice at the top of the page (don't remember what it is called though..) give me some hints, what do you see in that advanced options section ?

This is my first Projector and my first review.

Let me just start with this, I saw no Vertical Banding. I connected a Sencore Video Pro video generator to the componet-1 input. wow! I had the pj about 9 feet away from a white wall and the zoom all the way out and it produced a nice 95" picture. wow! We first put the sencore on a white panel to look for pixels that were not working, found none. We switched to the 9 color bar pattern, the colors look very vibrant.

The projector was very quiet. Until you turn it off you don't here the fan at all.

More to come, have to get some work done.

William

ummm, i'm waiting for a review here. I see that one was delivered this morning by UPS, and there should have been enough time by now to tell us something? Or maybe his jaw hit the ground so hard, he's unconscious or in ICU

I'm hoping he raves about this thing, so i can finally get a cheap 700U from one you guys who always need's the latest and greatest, and will be so excited to upgrade, that i will score a mega deal...Hey, i don't play the lottery, but i still dream.

bigrushhead... are you still looking for an AE-700?!? Hehehehehe.
I am curious to se the comparisons by those who have had the AE-700 and what improvements the new 900 gives them as well.

Craig

Work? There are more pressing issues at hand! Need more input!!!

Nilsp

Promising start.

Looking forward to hearing a full write-up soon.

Thanks.

I just found this new review from Australia. Scroll down on page to see review after specifications.

http://www.ausmedia.com.au/panasonic_ae_900.htm

Does anyone know where to see a copy of the Manual?

I haven't found it anywhere yet, but I'm going to compare the hard copy of the manual to the AE700. I imagine there will be more similarities than differences. I'll be firing the 900 up in another hour or so and we'll see how it goes.

I have looked through my AE900 manual and didn't find too much of a difference from the AE700 manual. Things seem pretty much the same in that regard which is fine... I'm looking for an increase in performance

Is overscan (cropping) adjustable on the AE900 for component video input?

There is no way to control overscan on the AE700. It crops about 5% of the image on all sides, which I find unacceptable.

on the edge of my seat....

Before we discuss any comparisons or analysis of the AE900, we will be doing a comma count in the new AE900 and AE700 manual. Please tune in for these critical results.


It's almost 9pm. Do you have a bloody clue yet about the AE900? Sorry I'm from New York and sarcasm is a staple. I can't believe into the first day of release we're posting on the respective manuals.

True dat!!!!

C'mon, fellow AVSers! Get with the program!

I just upgraded to the AE900 and what a great unit. I have my unit set up in my theater with about a 13'6" throw dist and the picture increased to 134" diag, The color is just brilliant and the 1100 lumens were good enough so that I could even turn the lights on about 75% before starting to loose the rich deep colors. I tested it with my HD and SD channels and watched a DVD. Threw in a couple very dark movies like Underworld and the contrast on dark colors is unbelievable. All this and I haven't even messed with the setup yet.

bottom line, out of the box, awesome rich colors and picture on everything. Even SD channels look good with the exception of a few channels on Dish that have a lousy picture anyway. Very quiet unit. Going to watch another movie.

I've already posted this list of questions in Daniel's thread but I'll do it again here as it looks like you lucky few will get to play with the AE900 first... Any help in answering these would be greatly appreciated.

1. Is the aspect ratio locked when viewing 720p or 1080i material?
2. Is there native panamorph support?
3. How is the scaling/deinterlacing... I think panny uses a proprietary chip? Any differences from previous pannys?
4. Will it handle 1080p input?
5. How soft/sharp is the picture with the new smoothscreen implementation (as compared to older implementations)?
6. With the HS51, people reported that the dynamic iris changes (brightness mainly) were noticeable. The AE900 is supposed to be able to change 60 times/sec... is it noticable in regular viewing?
7. Based on calibrated brightness, what is the largest screen you'd recommend?
8. If anyone in attendence has or has seen an AE300, will I be blown away by the upgrade?

-Matt

Here is a mini review from a thread just started by another member:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=586496

It has been suggested to me that the AE900U cant project a quality image bigger than 106 or 110". You say you projected a 134" image. How was its quality??
I may be ordering the PJ tomorrow and would like a 120+" screen, but not if it can't do that size of an image justice.
What do you think??

I got mine today and watched the Longest Yard and some HDTV over component. It is replacing my AE300, which I was mostly happy with except for the on/off contrast. I did not see any VB (and never saw any on the AE300 either), but FPN is still there. Contrast is better and the 900 was of course much brighter than my AE300 with 3300 hrs on it. I did my viewing in cinema1 with lamp on low and the DI on. I never noticed the DI working. The DVD looked a bit more like HDTV than it did on the 300, but the increase in resolution did not make nearly as much an impression as the better contrast did. I'm glad I upgraded, but would still like better on/off contrast-the black bars are still pretty grey. I have not seen the AE500 or AE700, but from what I have read the 900 is an improvement over them. I'm certainly glad I did not upgrade sooner.

I am interested in image size as well. I might be buying the AE900u sight unseen and want a screen at 120+". Any thoughts??

Thanks Rboster, should of posted this here.

I just upgraded to the AE900 and what a great unit. I have my unit set up in my theater with about a 13'6" throw dist and the picture increased to 134" diag, The color is just brilliant and the 1100 lumens were good enough so that I could even turn the lights on about 75% before starting to loose the rich deep colors. I tested it with my HD and SD channels and watched a DVD. Threw in a couple very dark movies like Underworld and the contrast on dark colors is unbelievable. All this and I haven't even messed with the setup yet.

bottom line, out of the box, awesome rich colors and picture on everything. Even SD channels look good with the exception of a few channels on Dish that have a lousy picture anyway. Very quiet unit. Going to watch another movie.

As Tim "The Tool man" Taylor says... "more power!"

NewTricks

I sent you a PM but to answer your question. 134" diagonal picture looks awesome in HD and DVD. When I test the SD Channels, they were broadcast in 4:3 and the picture was very nice with no overflow of light outside the picture. Everything was crisp. We played with the zoom to see if picture would change, especially on SD channels and there was no change to the 10 of us. Go as big as you can.

I've done a few hours of playing around with the 900 and as a DLP guy, I'm very impressed. I'll have more to comment on tomorrow after I run it through a full eval with Avia Pro and OpticOne, but right out of the box it looks really good.

This is the 4th unit I've seen now (two at CEDIA, the one used in the Projector Reviews test and this one) and none have had even a hint of vertical banding in any of the scenes or full color screens mentioned in other posts. I don't see any other artifacts (like FPN), but I've never seen it before so I'll defer to those that have.

There are a lot of adjustments possible through the user menu, so it could take some time to fine tune everything.

Most of the menu adjustments and capabilities are the same as the 700 and yes, the manuals are almost identical.

More to follow.

Could any of you lucky AE900 owners tell me how much a standard definition DVD video is cropped by this projector due to overscanning? And is the amount of overscanning adjustable on the AE900?