Best Plasma TV

Pioneer plasma TVs: Best, but costly

Pioneer and Pioneer Elite plasma TVs and monitors get the best reviews overall, though some reviewers address these TVs with a touch of melancholy. The current, and ninth, generation of Pioneer plasma TVs will be the last made with Pioneer-manufactured plasma panels. Starting with next year's 10th-generation models, Pioneer is handing over the panel production for its plasma TVs to Panasonic. While some critics are hopeful that the next generation of Pioneer TVs will be just as good, if not better -- after all, Panasonic has a great plasma TV reputation in its own right -- others are holding their breath waiting to see exactly what kind of offspring this marriage of convenience will produce.

But that's then, and this is now ... and right now, the best plasma TV is easily the very expensive 50-inch Pioneer Elite KURO PRO-111FD (*Est. $5,000). (KURO is a Japanese word meaning the darkest black possible.) Every reviewer who's looked at the set agrees -- if price is no object, this is the plasma TV to get. Scott Wilkinson at Ultimate AV sums up the consensus nicely when he writes: "If you insist on the best at any cost, look no further."

The reason for the reverence experts have toward this TV is simple: Blacks, blacks and more blacks -- simply the best blacks available on any TV. According to Sound & Vision's Al Griffin, the blacks are even deeper than last year's Pioneer Elite Kuro PRO-110FD plasma TV, something he says he thought to be impossible after testing that set. Accurate colors, terrific noise reduction, and a great anti-reflective screen round out what's nearly the perfect TV.

So what's not to like? Just one thing: it's nearly insanely expensive. At nearly $5,000, and with little discounting going on, it's twice the price or more of lots of very, very good alternatives, including Pioneer's own 50-inch KURO PDP-5020FD (*Est. $2,500), which streets for around half as much and is a truly terrific TV in its own right, say critics.

The story again starts with the black levels. No one explicitly compares the black levels of the PDP-5020FD with the PRO-111FD, but David Katzmaier at CNet has looked at both Pioneer plasma TVs and says that the PDP-5020FD "produces the deepest shade of black of any big-screen display we've tested." In other words, blacks are terrific, better than anything else out there this side of the PRO-111FD.

There are a couple of shortfalls compared to the Pioneer PRO-111FD, however. One is that while PRO-111FD is loaded with lots of advanced picture controls, things are "simplified" on the PDP-5020, perhaps too much so as some expected things -- such as color temperature and noise reduction controls -- are missing.

CNet's plasma-TV testing also turned up some color inaccuracy, but great color decoding and those deep black levels make the complaints mild indeed. For example, Katzmaier writes: "These issues certainly didn't spoil our enjoyment of the film, however, and the combination of deep blacks and accurate color decoding allowed the Pioneer to beat the rest of the displays at producing rich, saturated colors." Robert Heron at PC Magazine, on the other hand, finds no such issues at all with the Pioneer plasma TV, and writes "its range of color reproduction and consistent color accuracy are a perfect match for today's highest-quality HD video material."

In terms of features, the Pioneer PDP-5020FD plasma TV is loaded. There's lots of connectivity, with four HDMI inputs, including one that's on a front-accessible panel. It's DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) compliant, which means it can connect to devices like Windows PCs via it's Ethernet input to download and playback a host of multimedia file types. There's also a USB port for playing back content stored on a USB drive. Special modes include Optimum, which uses integrated sensors to adjust picture settings according to room lighting and what's showing on the screen. While many purists will certainly cringe at such a mode, Thomas J. Norton, who reviews the larger screened but otherwise identical 60-inch Pioneer KURO PDP-6020FD (*Est. $3,900) for Home Theater magazine, says "the KURO PDP-6020FD's subjective color in the Optimum mode came very close to the properly calibrated 60-inch Elite PRO-150FD ... which I parked beside it during my tests."