Pioneer has made the decision to only build plasma TVs and the focus has paid off. Its PDP-43HDG is a 43"/109cm 16:9 high-definition plasma with highly accurate colour; very good out-of-the-box performance and excellent connectivity. It's also available in a 50"/127 cm model.
Design
The Pioneer PDP-43HDG is one handsome-looking panel. A wide, high-gloss black bezel surrounds the 109 cm-diagonal screen. The only things interrupting the expanse of black are a remote sensor, a power button, one power indicator light, and the Pioneer logo.
A separate A/V media receiver houses all the connections, so only a single proprietary cable runs from the receiver to the panel (though the panel and the receiver require separate AC power cords). It's a convenient arrangement unless you find yourself having to purchase a cable longer than the standard 3 meters. You can place the component-size media receiver horizontally on a shelf or a rack or vertically on the small included base.
The matching silver-finish speakers can either be mounted to the side or beneath the screen, and the included stand has a cool swivel base. Pioneer also offers a couple of wall brackets if you want to hang it on a wall.
The remote, a redesign of an older Pioneer unit, is a fully backlit, universal clicker capable of controlling a wide variety of A/V gear. The keys are relatively well laid out, but some are a bit on the small side, making them somewhat awkward to use. We found the newly designed internal menu system relatively intuitive and easy to navigate.
Features
The Pioneer PDP-434HDG runs on a 72Hz vertical refresh rate. That's an exact multiple of the 24 frames per second at which films are displayed, enabling the panel to use a video-processing technique called 3:3 pull-down (instead of the 2:3 pull-down used in previous 60Hz displays). In English, that means you should see a more stable picture when viewing DVD movies and other video material that was originally shot on film. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to be the case in our tests (see Performance below for more).
This panel shares with its like-size, similarly priced competition a 1,024x768 native resolution. A count of 1,024x768 pixels still can't display 720p, the lowest high-def resolution, in full detail, but it's as high as plasmas get in this screen-size range.
Pioneer packed the PDP-434HDG with cool features. The numerous convenience features include dual-tuner PIP (picture-in-picture) with a split-screen option.
On the picture-enhancing side, we found the obligatory colour temperature selections (Low, Mid, and High) and a 3DYC comb filter for composite-video sources such as VHS and standard cable TV. Numerous picture presets, along with the ability to remember picture settings for each input individually, should satisfy image adjusters.
The PDP-4340HD's media receiver includes more jacks than we've seen with any plasma system to date. On the receiver's back panel, we counted two component-video inputs, two HDMI ports (you'll need a special adapter to convert DVI sources to HDMI), two FireWire ports, two A/V inputs with S-Video, two RF inputs, two RF outputs, and an RS232 control port for use with touch-panel control systems such as Crestron and AMX. A flip-down door on the front of the box hides a component-video input, an A/V input with S-Video, and a VGA input for computers, complete with a minijack audio input.
Performance
Even before we had made any serious adjustments, the picture in the Movie mode and the Low colour temperature looked surprisingly good. Colour fidelity, in particular, was outstanding. Reds and greens were in nearly perfect balance, allowing us to fully saturate the image with realistic colour.
Unfortunately, the promise of the 72Hz refresh rate and the 3:3 processing didn't seem to have much effect on our favourite test DVD for these types of issues, Star Trek: Insurrection. The pan across the boats and building tops still showed the same amount of jutter, which appears as a faintly jerky motion of the entire frame, that we saw in normal 2:3 pull-down processing. The Pioneer did a good job of removing jagged lines and other artefacts.
You'll have to be careful with the sharpness control. Set too high, it introduced the worst edge enhancement we've ever seen on any display, placing serious artificial edges around all lines; set too low, the picture looked soft. We settled at minus 2, which removed the edge enhancement and still preserved the sharpness of the picture.
After calibrating the panel, we looked at some scenes from Seabiscuit, one of our new reference DVDs. Colours were vibrant, and skin tones looked extremely natural. Dark scenes, on the other hand, suffered from a lack of shadow detail as a result of the panel's inability to display a deep black. Even the darkest areas were only a very dark grey. To Pioneer's credit, the PDP-434HDG produced truer blacks than previous Pioneer plasmas--indeed, better than most of the competition. False contouring artefacts and dancing pixels were minimal and visible only in extremely dark scenes.
Colour is definitely the PDP-4340HD's strongest performance parameter--better than that of any plasma we've seen yet. Dark scenes were a bit problematic, however; they exhibited the same performance hiccups in high definition that we observed on DVDs.
mustafa@hujra.com
27/01/2006, 02:44 AM
The best I have seen in its cl****
Although not an LCD which is technically superior, I have found this monitor to provide equally as good visual and audio quality as any LCD High defintion TV at half the price for the same size.
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