PDP-42A3HD Viewing Evaluations

I was concerned about the Pioneer's performance in grayscale as I witnessed significant banding and colorization during low IRE gradients. How this would translate into real-world picture material was an unknown, but something I was determined to find out. The difficult thing about flagging a problem early is the temptation to keep at it until you figure out how to make it reproduce the problem. I tried to keep this in mind during my viewing commentary lest you place too much emphasis on what was clearly, at times, a witch hunt.

DVD: The Brothers Grimm

This movie was terrific in that it featured tons of color, detail and a healthy serving of dark scenes with which to test and evaluate the complete gamut and dynamic range of this display.

Detail received an A+ rating. Color was outstanding and showed that Pioneer has what it takes to reproduce vibrant colors and a truly dynamic and satisfying picture. Black levels, however, were consistently poor - surprising for a plasma display, though we understand that Pioneer produced this television to address consumers who want to get into an HD set on a lower budget. Where there should be detail in darker scenes I found large swatches of black. There was also a stark difference between the beautiful jet black frame which bordered the display and the black picture which appeared a darkish gray by comparison (more akin to what you would expect from an average LCD display).

DVD: Four Brothers

It was a "brothers" theme this week as we queued up Four Brothers , a film which gave us plenty of high quality source material with which to evaluate the Pioneer plasma display.

Again, color was outstanding, though I'll admit we didn't happen to view material that would challenge the Pioneer's apparent green gamut deficiency - something I really don't think would be much of a bother in real-world viewing. Facial detail was exceptional, though we did note several instances of moiré pattern, especially in the sweater-shirt as pictured in the second frame shown here. A later scene depicting an SUV cruising through a snowy terrain lacked some detail in the white levels, which came across a bit flat and untextured.

HDTV - Discovery HD: American Chopper

This is just a great show. It's a little bit like watching the Simpsons - but in real life. You've got the idiotic son, the domineering, but not particularly intelligent paternal figure, and the sensible "other" sibling who keeps the whole place from falling apart. Oh yeah, they make really cool custom motorcycles for charities, businesses and rich people - some of which who look like they've never ridden a bike in their lives.

At last I was able to able to take a look at that green saturation. As I expected, there was simply no problem in that area. The Pioneer has excellent overall color response, better than many flat panels I have seen lately - at least with respect to critical reds and blues.

As for the rest of my HDTV evaluation, I focused mostly on seeing how well the PDP-42A3HD handled detail. For a cable TV picture in high definition, it did a fine job. The bikes, background, and facial features offered up plenty of opportunity for mucking up the image - it simply never happened. The Pioneer came through and produced a vibrant, detailed image every time.

Black Level Banding

The image on the left is the Village Roadshow Pictures introduction to Matrix: Reloaded as seen by the Pioneer PDP-42A3HD (and as rendered by my Pentax digital camera). The image on the right was snapped with the same camera, but from a Sanyo LCD projector. The DVD player used to generate both images was a Denon DVD-5900. Not only is there significant banding in the dark areas of the Pioneer image, but the dark bands do indeed take on the reddish colorization as I witnessed when calibrating the display. White levels are crushed as well and overall the net effect is a greatly diminished dynamic range. This is something that will need to be adjusted in the service level menus of the display to achieve the maximum potential for this device.

This image was from one of the earlier scenes of The Brothers Grimm . Here you could again see the dark banding when an image fades towards black, achieving a posturization effect rather than a smooth, even gradation.