What Hi-Fi? Verdict
Still great, but rivals leave the AE4000E wanting in certain areas
Pros
- +
Great HD spec
- +
easy set-up
- +
punchy, bright colours
- +
fine insight
Cons
- -
A little noise at times
- -
not the contrast reach of best
Why you can trust What Hi-Fi? Our expert team reviews products in dedicated test rooms, to help you make the best choice for your budget. Find out more about how we test.
Panasonic has made it its business to knock out great home cinema projectors at this price.
Eagle-eyed readers will know that the PT-AE4000E has proved to be just such a chip off the old block, with a best-in-class for 2010 Award rubber-stamping our approval for this LCD projector.
Updated with tech tweaks
Not content to rest on its laurels, Panasonic been a-tweaking, introducing a new Red Rich lamp, (which aims to boost brightness and improve colour), a claimed contrast ratio of 100,000:1, and an Intelligent Lens Memory that lets you store six settings.
There's no cutting-edge tech for projectors around this price to be keeping pace with – we've only seen one 3D projector so far and it was a fair chunk more expensive than this – so the three HDMI inputs and 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution ensure this projector remains adequately specified.
With a £2k projector we expect nothing less than a picture that's easy to set-up thanks to flexible zoom and position controls, and that's the case here. A little tweaking to the picture and we're happy with what's in front of us.
Punchy, bright and vivid colours
Toy Story 3 shows that punchy, bright, vivid colours remain the Panasonic's comfort zone, working alongside an impressive degree of detail that makes for rounded, realistic characters – even if they are animated (superbly).
Switch to some human skin tones courtesy of the storming Blu-ray of Inception, and the 4000E shows itself capable of a more natural touch, while still bringing a lively, punchy picture to the table and handling motion well enough.
But with some fresh competition, we do now – brace yourselves – find the odd flaw. Tricky-to-render patterns and textures (such as a the linen jackets worn in the Inception scene set in Mombasa) turn-up
a little noise and there's also not quite the dynamic contrast offered elsewhere.
The 4000E is still great, but thanks to some serious price-slashing elsewhere, the bar in this category has been raised
See all our projector Best Buys
Follow whathifi.com on Twitter
