The Practical HT Guide Update, Issue #019

The Practical HT Guide Update brings you the latest additions in a series of informative home theater design articles, unbiased system reviews, practical guidelines and free advice.

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The holiday season is over now ...so it is time to continue with our never ending but enjoyable site activity.

In reality, I did not take a break - rather I continued working on the site but at a slower pace - the real reason being that I was enjoying myself playing around with two Panasonic home theater projectors that were under review in connection with my work on the site; the video projectors in question were the PT-AE700U and the PT-AE900U.

Both projectors represent Panasonic present line of budget high-definition, widescreen LCD home theater projectors, with the latest release in this line of products being the PT-AE900U.

The PT-AE700U was originally released towards the end of 2004. When released over a year ago, it represented a break-through in price-performance terms with respect to LCD video projection technology. Panasonic had managed to push LCD projection technology to a point where it seriously started to challenge DLP projection technology.

A year later down the line, the Panasonic PT-AE700U home theater projector is still proving to be a great success - the reason: The PT-AE700U is a real solid performer that comes with a rather inexpensive price tag (presently it is selling online at under $1,600).

Yet with their latest release, Panasonic is promising even more. In fact, with the PT-AE900U, Panasonic is now challenging the more expensive single-chip DLP projectors head to head - not just on price, but even more so in terms of performance. This new Panasonic home theater projector is as good as most of the DLP projectors of the same 720p resolution. The PT-AE900U excels in color accuracy, color saturation, and a smooth, film-like image that is totally lacking in pixelation. Certainly, the more expensive DLP video projectors still hold their own in contrast and black-level performance, but the overall difference between LCD and DLP, is no longer what it used to be.

And for a high performance high definition home theater projector that is selling online at under $2,000, there are surely a lot of reasons for consumers to consider this Panasonic home theater projector as a possible relatively inexpensive big screen option for their home theater.

Calibration DVDs: There is an article in the pipeline that discusses the use of home theater calibration DVDs when setting up a new system. The idea cropped up during the review sessions on the Panasonic home theater projectors detailed above. Surely, it would have been impossible to attain the very best out of these high performance video projectors without the use of an appropriate calibration DVD.

It is an unfortunate fact that while many home theater owners are ready to spend a fortune on all sort of gear, yet, very very few would ever consider investing in a good set-up DVD. Therefore, we though of delving further into this subject.

Home Theater Design Guides: I am in the process of starting to revise all content appearing under the Home Theater Design section of the site. This is a rather extensive section with more than 11 guides that cover various aspects of the home theater design process.

Site Maintenance: It is also time to continue with our site maintenance - this mainly concerns the site RSS feed. I am in the process of setting up a different system to manage the site feed with the objective to ensure that the all feed updates are issued in a more timely and consistent manner.

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