My Panasonic AE 4000 just reached the 1000 hour mark. The lamp is definitely showing signs of age. I mentioned before that there was noticeable dimming around the 150 hour mark which has continued steadily. I’m now finding that for some material switching from “cinema 1” to “normal” mode not only brightens the picture but improves the colour balance. Still running in eco-mode but now there is a noticeable increase in brightness when switching over to normal whereas before it was hard to tell the difference.
Part of the reason the dimming has become more noticeable is that about I month ago I picked up a Samsung LED to replace my aging DLP. The LED being much brighter than both the DLP and the projector makes the dimming more noticeable. However when the room is dark (and the LED isn’t on for comparison) the AE4000 is still more than bright enough to fill the 134” diagonal screen and look great. Still I feel an upgrade coming by next year.
By buying the Samsung LED for a backup display and primary computer monitor I went from averaging 75 hours/week on the AE4000 down to 20. The old DLP had just gotten to painful to look at so I was hardly using it at all.
I also got off my lazy butt and finished running all my wiring. It’s only been 11 months, 4 of them with 12 sets of speaker wire 3xHDMI cables, 2xVGA cables and a subwoofer cable running across the floor. No one has ever accused me of being anal. One important tip. If you plan on running wire through conduit (PVC pipe in my case) don’t forget to buy fishing line. Instead of being able to pull the wiring I ended up having to push it which probably doubled the time it took and made it much more difficult. I was actually able to fit 2xHDMI, 1xVGA, and 4x12 gauge speaker wires through the PVC pipe despite having to push it.
A couple nights ago I drop tested one of my QS8s from 5’. One grill didn’t survive but the speaker did. They sure are solid little buggers. Maybe tonight I will do some tweaking to decide where and how I finally want to mount the QS8 surrounds so I can finally get them off the floor since my other plans fell through. Might also run Audyssey again to see how things sound with/without it now that all the curtains are up.
I was planning to watch a couple Blu-ray’s from Netflix tonight but looks like the weekend letter carrier put all my movies in the wrong mailbox again. I guess life’s good if you biggest complaint is not getting your Netflix movies.
Cheers,
Dean
