You've got to respect the effort that Gary Merson, a.k.a. the
HD Guru, puts into his TV reviews. Thorough and technically savvy, he relentlessly exposes the
weaknesses of displays passing through his lab. His latest review is a showdown between two 50-inch plasmas vying for the top, the new Pioneer
Pro-111FD and the Panasonic TH-50PZ850U. We've long heard about these 9th generation Pioneer plasmas, the last to come off of Pioneer production lines, so our eyes perked up at the comparison. We won't spoil the outcome of the "two plasmas enter, one plasma leaves" showdown (and that pesky $1500 price difference between the two units is significant), but we will say that the Pioneer lived up to the Kuro name by displaying blacks too dark for the Guru to reliably measure with his test gear. Oh, and the 10th generation promises to be darker still.
posted Jul 9th 2008 12:42AM
I've got a 1080p kuro and the picture quality is amazing, it makes it almost painful to watch any kind of video content on my computer monitor. I watched Persepolis on blu-ray a few days ago, which is quite 'inky' with lots of blacks and I was stunned at how nice it looked (although admittedly I was comparing to the backseat screens in the aeroplanes... but still, lol)
I'd love to see what this new plasma looks like in person.
$1000 difference, or less.
You can get the Pioneer at Best Buy for $3600 (or less), and this is putting it against Amazon's Panasonic price.
That said, both of these units rock.