Panasonic PT-AE3000 Projector Calibration

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Art Feierman

We calibrate each home theater that is reviewed. It is a pretty standard calibration, there's always more that can be done by some of the "hi-end" calibrators.

Color Temperature


30 IRE (dark gray)	6233K
50 IRE (medium gray)	6340K
80 IRE (light gray)	6447K
100 IRE(white)	6519K

As shown in the brightness measurements, out of the box, the Cinema 1 mode (best movie mode), is a very good 6519K at white. We also measured the various gray level color temperatures

Basic Settings

In addition to calibrating Red Green and Blue for a correct grayscale balance (6500K), there are a number of other settings that come into play. Typically Contrast and Brightness (white balance and black balance), need to be done first. Color saturation and gamma also need to be adjusted. With some projectors even Tint comes into play, although with most, the Tint control only works with the lower quality inputs (composite and S-video).

Our settings (numbers in parens are the default numbers)


Preset Mode	Cinema 1
Contrast	1 (0)
Brightness	3 (0)

Gamma - the Panasonic has separate gamma settings for


Lamp Mode:	Standard (unless noted otherwise)
Iris	On
Color Saturation	-6 (0)
Tint	0 (0)

Post Calibration Grayscale

The PT-AE3000U produced truly excellent results, with only a 60 degree temperature.

That covers it all. This is one of a few projectors which is good enough out of the box, that I won't scream "calibrate it, or pay someone to calibrate it". There is always variation from one projector to another, due to the lamp variation (and colors will actually shift slightly as the lamp ages), but because we didn't have to do much adjusting, most of you will find plugging in our numbers will improve the picture of an already good projector.