Today was the day when I got the crown jewel of my home entertainment system: A Panasonic PT-AE1000
The device is capable of displaying the 1920×1080 resolution which means that it’s capable of showing 1080p content (at 50,60 and even 24 Hertz). It’s the thing that was needed to complete my home entertainment setup.
The projector is quite large but not that heavy. I also like the motorized lens controls for zoom and focus and I love the incredible lens shift range: You can basically move the picture the whole size of it in any direction. This allowed me not to tilt the device even though it’s mounted quite high up on the ceiling. No tilt means no keystone distortion.
Even though all projectors provide you with some means to correct the keystone effect, but you’ll automatically lose picture quality and content when using it, so it’s best to leave it off.
Unfortunately, the device has one flaw: It reports totally wrong screen resolutions via DCC when you connect the projector via DVI (or HDMI, but that’s the same thing).
It tells windows (strangely enough, it works on Mac OS X) that it supports the resolution of 1920×540 at some strange refresh rate of around 54 Hz.
The intel chipset of my Mac Mini can’t output this resolution so it falls back to 480p and there’s no possiblity of changing this.
With the help of PowerStrip (which you won’t even need when you are reading this), I created a corrected Monitor .INF-File that has the correct resolution and acceptable refresh rates in it (taken from the projectors manual).
Once you tell windows to update the driver of your monitor and point it to this file specifically, it will allow you to set the correct resolution.
*phew* – problem solved.
Aside of this glitch, so far, I love the projector. Very silent, very nice picture quality, perfect colors and it even looks quite acceptable with its black casing. This is the projector I’m going to keep for many years as there’s no increase of resolution in sight for a very long time.
gnegg 