Plasma: Which One?

Grentz said:
Panny S1 here. Excellent TV. Use service menu settings from avsforum and the colors are amazingly accurate for no professional calibration. Best entry level 1080p plasma period.

The Samsungs are the only ones close, and they tend to have more vibrant colors (not necessarily a good thing, but some like the look). They also are more susceptible to image retention (very noticeable at times).

Pioneer Kuros were amazing, best Plasmas period, but expensive. Panasonic bought the patents and such so you will be seeing Kuro Panasonics soon.
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When we were shopping for tv's years ago all the stores had Pioneer plasmas on display with all the other tvs as well. We would look at them all and then our jaws just dropped when we saw the picture quality of the Pioneer's. Head and shoulders above everything else. Made us wonder if the other units were even HD. Our jaws dropped even further when we saw the price. But I have to say that if we had the funds at the time it was a no brainer to get the Pioneer. We ended up walking out on quite a few stores after seeing them with nothing purchased. Eventually we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would never be able to afford one of them and had to pick what we liked out of the rest of the options.

My brother-in-law and sister went looking for a tv a year or so later and we noticed that the Pioneers were no longer on display with all the other tv's. They either had a separate section away from the others or weren't even turned on. The sales guy wouldn't admit why but we knew.

To this day we still think that the Pioneers were hands down the best tv's mankind has ever produced.

We ended up with a Sony KDF-50WE655. At the time almost nothing used 1080p. In fact most store displays didnt even have an HD source going to them. The ones that did only had Discovery HD Theater as it was the only 100% HD source available at the time. Mines an old unit but still has a great picture.

I am now looking for about a 40" tv for my bedroom and can tell you that tv buying was so much easier back then. Way too many choices to be made now. My budget isnt the $3000 it was back then for the living room tv. Im trying to work with about $600 and from the looks of it just have to wait til I gather up another $400 bucks for the good stuff.
 
JCDenton said:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/home-theater/?p=2647

Anyone still looking should be aware of this article. Panasonic's second rate black levels are getting even worse. Pioneer4Life
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Woah, that's interesting. Mine is a 2008 model and I can't say I've noticed blacks getting worse. Does it only happen to certain models or all Panasonics?

I found one of the replies there quite funny though:

are you bonkers?

tft's last for 10 years + no worries while the average plasma needs recharging in 4 years

the contrast and response times on plasma's is good for short period of time but it has to get reduced fairly fast or the set dies to early fyi a 50k>1 contrast ratio has to be stepped down in 1k intervals for every 10 hours of use or that 10,000 hours tv is going to last 100 hours once they drop the ratio down to around 20k>1 it should just about make it to the vaunted 10,000 hours.

lcd or tft screens are superior in every way to plasma the off angle blure you speak of is worse on plasma given that you need to be about 2ft away from the screen and at that distance a plasma screen is all lines.

motion blur only happens in cheap sets and affects both the low end plasma's and the bottom of the bin lcd's (anything over 16ms response time is going to have blur problems)

if you bothered to look around at decent lcd sets in the last 10 years you would know that the problem of viewing angle /distance was all down to the missmatch of the glass in front of the liquid crystal panel not to mention the incorrect focal distance hence why so many cheap as chips screens look so poor, if your going to trash talk a product at least get your facts straight.
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So much wrong there don't know where to start :D
 
I already posted earlier but I'd like to provide a little update. The TH-50PZ800U located in the living room now has a huge black vertical bar, around 2-3 inches in width. I wasn't present at the time but my roommate heard a large pop that came out from the back of the display. Upon further investigation, this is a common issue with some plasmas. Also, this article has convinced me to get either a used Kuro (for cheap, of course) LG or Samsung when it's my turn to buy an HDTV. If it was my TV, I'd be really upset (costed 2.5k retail) but it isn't. :D
 
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