1. Pioneer has had a 1080p plasma available for over a year and a half. This is simply the 1080p version of their next-generation plasma.

2. The 720p Kuro plasmas have been available since mid-June at retail, not "last week".

3. Retail prices on the 50" and 60" 1080p Kuros are $5000 and $6000, respectively. Street prices will be about a thousand less on each.

Criminey. Do some research.

Editor's note: Pioneer does not currently have any native 1920 x 1080 plasma sets with built-in HD tuners. Retailers do not currently have their own prices set for the new models. The Kuro sentence has been updated.

EA does not have any current games that run natively at 1080p.

Editor's note: EA currently offers NBA Street Homecourt at native 1080p on the Xbox 360. Several other titles have some form of 1080p support.

I don't see how they have a chance to be competitive at the high end without a size larger than 60" Panasonic already has 65 as does Sharp.
Pioneer pic is superb (I have an 1140) but size matters!

Panasonic Viera TH-42PZ700B 42in Plasma TV

http://www.trustedreviews.com/tvs/review/2007/07/30/Panasonic-Viera-TH-42PZ700B-42in-Plasma-TV/p1

Rocking:)

I am willing to bet that the market for 60 is heavily favored by front projection. I know people with the ~70 DLP's and it looks silly in that there are hardly any stands for it. In addition, greater than 60 really needs to be wall mounted for decent viewing angles (mainly in the vertical direction). Therefore, I believe front projection, as I have done, is the more popular solution.

I bought a 37" Westinghouse 1920x1080 8ms, for $1500 and the 46" with same specs wasn't much higher but I didn't want the bigger size because it was to be plugged into a computer and not for home theater.

Black is black. I find it funny when we see discussion of the black levels on televisions. Are we not really discusing the darkest gray that it can display and then would it not be better to quantify this gray level instead of just saying "darker"? Oh well, then I guess it would be too easy to choose televisions if we exactly knew their limitations. I wonder for how long we will continue seeing darker or deeper blacks with each new model.

Couldn't agree more. There should be a standard that specifies the attainable GRAY level in a display. No Plasma or LCD can display true black (yet), and some display it so poorly that there really should be an official standard for GRAY level. Sometimes you really can't tell at a store, and if you can't see it for yourself, saying that a TV has "Dark Blacks" and "Deep Blacks" is just confusing without some sort of basis of comparison.

Because, no any visible resolution enhancements at
50 inch display over 720p standard. Problem is in our
eyes native resolution at standard distance.

The "black" referred to is the video signal itself, not the display representation. Video is a normalized gray scale with level 16 in 8 bit (64 in 10 bit) defined as absolute black. Levels below that are blacker than black and theoretically should not be visible on a display. In practice it's best to see it just barely to avoid black clipping.

Obviously any illumination (no matter how small) on the display when fed black is in fact a dark gray. There are limitations to vision that after a certain point further reduction of black illumination does not yield a perceptible improvement.

A consequence to improved black illumination is that deficiencies in the required log to linear electronic gamma correction for plasma become more apparent. Dither noise is typically used to minimize "contouring". However, the improvement in display resolution raises the dither frequency which reduces the viewing distance required to eliminate its visibility. To date, only displays which utilize direct electron excitation of phosphors, such as CRT and SED, do not require electronic gamma correction.

This why it's stupid to buy a plasma HDTV. For literally half the price, you can buy a high end Sony or Samsung LCD with a 15000:1 contrast ratio, HDMI 1.3, and be FULL HD compliant.

Plasma makers - stick to 720p sets.

How much better do blacks, contrast ratios and color rendition really need to get? Most folks are more that happy with the stunning picture quality most sets provide today ~ inrespective of the 1080p question. The marginal gains from generation to generation at this stage of the ball game are only impressive to the few, the proud, the esoteric (which I happen to be btw but that's not important here...)

What really plagues Plasma folks is the 2x the power requirement to operate the frickin things.
700 watts is far from green in these energy conservation times we live. Also, power dissipation equals heat ~ and heat equates to reduced reliability.

It's the cost of ownership over the long haul folks...

700 watts!

In order to get such poppy white colors and dark blacks, Sony had to change the color of white in 1987. Whites natural temperature is around 6500 degrees kelvin. Sony Changed it to 9500 degrees kelvin in 1987 with their first really popular selling TVs.

Why do I bring this up? Put "Aliens" in your DVD player on your TV. Notice that how in some really dark scenes you can't see anything? Thats because When Sony increased the intensity of white, they darkened black. You should still be able to see some things in the shadow detail, but shadow detail is lost thanks to "darker black."

Go to your local BestBuy (first make sure you eat something so that you do not fill up on the crap there) and find their "calibration" display. This is the one thing BestBuy is doing right by customers.

You will see two screens, the exact same TV, off the exact same HDDVD or Blue Ray Player. One will have a brighter white and darker black. But then take out a white sheet of paper, and put it up to the white on the "sharper" screen. Ask yourself why a white sheet of paper is not as white as the white in that screen.

When Pioneer talks about increasing black, what they are really doing is just changing intensities. This will lower the quality of image compared to if you really had been there. Ever wonder when you are looking at a image on TV, lets say a golf game, why the grass is so rediculously green, and you think to yourself it is not that green in real life? Well, it is not. The TVs color has been tampered with by the manufacturer.

Now do not think you can go into your contrast and brightness settings and fix this. The only way to correct the gamma and color temperatures properly is to use the manufacturers service menus, which you cannot access.

BTW black is not black. Black is the lack of intensity in white, so if the manufacturer increases the intensity in white, the black will seem darker to the human eye.

True black is absolute darkness which can be approximated by looking into a container of a high quality jet-black pigment; you can see absolutely nothing - not a hint of relection nor any detail of the container, while everything around looks normal. On a TV what you see is a range of contrasts between a dark gray and whatever white level is selected by the brighness control at the color temperature of the "white" setting. What really matters is shadow and highlight detail, which is sometimes hard to get, with a nice contrasty (not flat)looking picture. Wedding photographers, using digital cameras, struggle with this same problem of maintaining white wedding dress detail and dark facial features, without the pictures looking flat because of the limited tonal range of their equipment and the paper it is printed on. Pioneer is doing its best to achieve an extreme tonal and brightness range and trying to reduce reflections from the screen. Does it show? I think it does.

Black is 000000
White is FFFFFF

So what's the fuzz? ;) Haha