Panasonic AE4000 - the geeky stuff

By Nigel Beale

March 2010

Panasonic PT-A4000E. $4299

Continued from the Panasonic AE-4000 review

The waveform monitor returns again, although most people don’t understand its purpose. It is not uncommon to find the source equipment varies in output levels, the idea here is to match the source output levels so that you do not clip the top end ‘contrast’ or cut off the bottom end ‘brightness’ of the source. Running the auto align with a stepped greyscale from your player matches the projector to the player.

Now the section I was so eager to get my hands on.

Even though the Colour1 mode is good out of the box it can be fine tuned to be even tighter tolerances or any of the other modes can be dialled in as well.

Deep in the AE4000E menus are some serious calibration tools for the advanced enthusiast and professional calibrator to fine tune the image, though I should point out with the advanced calibration tools doing anything by eye will probably lead to creating a mess of the image.

Firstly, the old colour management tool, which has been part of the AE projectors for a long time, which no one ever used because it did absolutely nothing useful except to change one colour out of thousands to another colour, finally has been updated. The old mode exists, however switch it to the six colour mode and it is now a functioning colour management tool to set the primaries and secondarys closer to HD standard ITU-R BT.709 or any other gamut within the adjustment range.

Although the tool is disabled in Colour1 or Colour2 modes since these are predefined and fairly accurate out of the box, you can however use it in any of the other modes that uses the default full gamut range producible by the projector.

For white balance there is the standard RGB cuts and gains, but for the gamma section there is a new adjustment tool with two main options, the traditional low, mid and high gamma control and an advanced option. Enabled allows for a nine-point adjustment of Y, R, G and B gamma tracking. This is a really powerful tool for the professional calibrator, even though it does add quite of bit of time to do a calibration process the resulting gamma white balance tracking can be superb.

The following charts are a calibration of Cinema 1 mode, it doesn’t get any better than this, enjoy. To the left is before calibration, to the right is after calibration.

Nigel Beale of Masterpiece Calibration Ltd is an ISF-qualified calibrator working out of Christchurch. Phone him on 027 204 3090.

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