Calibrating the Television

We used Datacolor's Colorfacts Professional 6.0 software to measure and help calibrate black and white levels on this plasma television. The Pioneer was a pleasure to calibrate and seemed to "hold" its calibration well rather than showing improvements at the two primary calibration points alone - a common trait among more budget-oriented televisions... I call it "rubberband" calibration syndrome. The overall theme of this display continued to be "black levels". It repeatedly made up for the lack of overall brightness inherent on plasmas with exceptionally dark blacks and it generated real world contrast ratios (we measured 661:1 ANSI before calibration) that were impressive for a calibrated flat panel display.

CIE Chart - Color Reproduction & Saturation Potential

While the CIE "shark fin" is representative of all the colors we can see as humans, the part we're focused on is shown with a black triangular outline. This is the target color range for HDTV video and the current standard we measure against when determining a display's color reproduction capability. The closer the white triangle is to the black triangle, the richer the overall colors.

Using a signal generator is best for capturing extreme RGB color data, however we ran the test using an AVIA Pro DVD as our source for color. That, combined with setting the Intelligent Color and Color Space menu settings to their lowest possible points may have contributed to the diminished greens we see here. In practical viewing, the Pioneer still looked extremely vibrant and colorful.

Before	After Calibration
We first determined that the best color temperature starting point was 'Mid-Low'. Our 'Before' measurements showed a display with excessive blues and reds throughout the entire luminance range. Even this isn"t bad compared to the defaults of many models we've seen, however.	Calibration yielded excellent results that didn't jump around too much across the working range of the television. The resulting grayscale was flatter than ever. There as no "rubberband syndrome" on this calibration.
The starting gamma luminance curve was actually a bit brighter than we desired, and blacks took on a more grayish tint.	After calibration and setting the black levels a bit more accurately we still had the slight s-curve gamma response, but the results were extremely pleasing to the eye and shadow information could be discerned in great detail.
The color temperature reading before calibration was approximately 6800K. Not bad.	We actually managed to get it almost exactly to D65 across the entire range.

Brightness uniformity on this display was an impressive 98%. It's hard to match this on LCD displays and even lesser plasmas don't typically fare quite this well.

Audioholics/HQV Bench Testing Summary of Test Results

Perfect Score is 130
Pioneer PRO-940HD Benchmark Score: 85 (one of the better flat panels we've tested)

*Noise reduction was excellent on this display. **Set NR to low to avoid motion adaptive artifacts, but even set at high the smearing isn't too obtrusive. ***Horizontal scrolling text overlays tear when PureCinema is enabled.

Comments on HQV Testing

What surprised us about these results was the Scrolling Horizontal test. This is the first display that I've seen fail it. This was unusual given the PRO-940HD's overall scoring and performance in other areas. For some reason, and no matter what alternative IP settings I selected in the Advanced menu, combing was evident in horizontal scrolling text overlays. Turning PureCinema mode 'Off' completely fixed the horizontal scrolling, but it also removed jaggie reduction and implementation of correct 2:3 pulldown. Noise reduction on this set was exceptional; though going beyond a 'Low' setting will begin to introduce some smearing and Motion Adaptive artifacts. The 'High' settings will actually result in a loss of significant detail, so stick to 'Low' or 'Medium' on these features (this applies to both NR and MPEG NR).

I ran a series of Moving Zone Plate tests and found the Pioneer to be very good at both low and high speed 2:3 pull down deinterlacing. The standard Zone Plate tests failed completely and the 2:2 tests were only marginally acceptable. With these tests I am mostly focusing on 2:3, so the Pioneer did very well, however its cadence and flagless error correction support leaves some room for improvement.