Project: Projector

With disappointment I have abandoned the Sanus (that’s a lousy name for a company) shelf I was using for the Panasonic PT-AX200U video projector. A photo of the projector as it was is at this link. Click the small picture to enlarge and see how it now is, sitting on a Da-Lite projector stand. The Sanus TV shelf is a very good piece of inexpensive hardware that’s available at any Target store, but my mounting scheme didn’t hold up. It’s now going to be used to get the computer monitor off my desk, but this time it will be properly anchored with bolts to a wall stud.

The Panny 200U continues to amaze and delight. I’m especially pleased with being able to enlarge 4:3 material to fill up the screen, 80 inches diagonal. Looks super, man!

But what are the projector’s faults? It must have some. Yes, it does. As I said before, two of them are common in projectors using 3LCD technology.

• Color uniformity of bright white
• Panel alignment

When there’s a large area of bright white — the ice of a hockey game, for example — the left edge is a bit reddish and the right edge has a green tint. As far as the alignment goes, with three separate LCD panels it isn’t perfect. I wouldn’t expect it to be, especially in a projector in this price range, but it isn’t a problem, because you have to make an effort with test patterns or the on-screen menu to see where the convergence is off. Neither of these minor issues is a reason to complain. In my life I’ve gone from black and white TV and vinyl records, to Dolby Digital and HDTV. Every technology has its strengths and weaknesses, and no product is perfect. I think this projector is a great deal for the money.

A major factor in favor of the Panasonic PT-AX200U is that it’s free of the screen door effect that plagues LCD projectors, like the 1024×768 3LCD Hitachi units I see at the office. Unlike minor panel misalignments, the screen door effect is very obvious. Eliminating it results in the 200U having an image that looks very much like watching a movie, which is what I want. Some projector fans may think the picture looks a bit soft, but my guess is their idea of image sharpness is actually due to seeing the outlines of the pixels. These are perhaps the same people who feel Clear Type (sub-pixel) fonts in Windows XP look fuzzy.

But somebody at Panasonic must have been worried about potential complaints about softness, because somewhere in the video processor there seems to be some edge enhancement. I really dislike edge enhancement. It appears only selectively, so it isn’t a simple always-on thing, like the old Scanning Velocity Modulation circuit in regular TV’s. Some of the better TV sets let you disable SVM, and I sure wish the PT-AX200U had a way to turn off its edge enhancement circuit.