Beautiful Day

I could have afforded a 1080p projector, however there are a number of differences worth considering:

• Most of the stuff I could be watching on mainstream TV in New Zealand will be 720p or less in terms of broadcast resolution. Any DVDs that I have or borrow will be 720p or less. Most (but not all) movies that I have on my computer are 720p or less. So, having a 720p resolution projector makes more sense than 1080p at this point. The next projector I buy will be 1080p however (once the market for 1080 settles a bit).
• On the plus side (for 1080p), thats where the new technology is. So, 1080p projectors will generally have better statistics and performance (for a huge price too, don’t forget!). 720p projectors are a bit older tech, and use older LCD panels (and are thus a lot cheaper! ^_^). However, in practice, this quality difference is not really noticible unless you compare side by side and actually have 1080p material in the first place.
• 720p projectors (from what I’ve looked at) are generally brighter than ther 1080p counter parts. Case in point, the 1080p projector from Panasonic is 1600 lumins, vs the 2000 lumins of the AX200. So, you pay more for 1080p, but it isn’t as bright. Brightness adds a lot of versatility to placement and usage.
• 720p projectors are far cheaper than their 1080p counter parts, especially in New Zealand where all electronics is about 2 times as expensive as overseas.

1080p projectors are still getting better and better. I expect that 720p projectors will get better, but have generally got to the point where they won’t see much more development.

There was actually only one major reason to go for 1080p and that was photography. I’m actually quite keen to use my projector for displaying photography. Given that my camera is a 40D, it takes pictures of a resolution approximately 3500x2500 or something in that ball-park. With 720 dots vertically, portrait photographs are very cramped up.

However, on the other hand, an increase of resolution wouldn’t really resolve this problem directly. I’m actually planning to project onto a 120” screen finally, so this may alleviate some of the problem.

And really, my eye-sight is not that great, so 720p is more resolution than my eyes can pickup without wearing glasses. Thats the real case in point for me!

In comparison to other 720p projectors, we have a few from Epson which look good, and the Sanyo PLV-Z5. The Sanyo looks good, too. However, it is no where near as bright as the Panasonic. I suspect the Panasonic is more of an all-round general projector, wherease the Z5 is better for cinematography. One really nice thing about the AX200 is the SmoothScreen technology. Looking at images from both projectors really was a tie-breaker for me - the SmoothScreen equipped AX200 just looked so much clearer. People have commented that the Z5 is a sharper projector, but even if it is, I’d actually still prefer the “clarity” of the SmoothScreen technology.

All in all, if your looking for your first projector and:

• Don’t want to spend a whole heap of money
• Don’t have much 1080p material
• Want to use it for gaming and computers
• Want to use in ambient light conditions

The Panasonic AX200 is the projector for you. After spending several weeks research, looking at image quality of most of the major 720p units, this is my conclusion. As for 1080p, the Epson line of Home Cinema projectors look really really nice, but they are hell expensive in NZ - almost twice the price as they are in Japan.

(I wanted to mention one thing about this projector. On all modes, you should turn “Sharpenss” to as low as you can put it. The sharpness filter is very bad and causes a lot of ugly artifacts, especially when you are projecting a computer user interface. I was actually contemplating returning the projector because of the bad blooming effect, but once I turned the sharpness all the way down, this problem was much less of an issue.)