Pioneer Kuro PDP-5010FD

Reviewed by:

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Great image detail, excelent upscaling of non-HD content, great sound, great connectivity options.

Weaknesses: Some adjustments are clumsy. Glare from glass sceen and bezel.

Overall Evaluation: For off-the-air content, with my old $20 Magnavox amplified loop for antenna input, the HD programs from ABC/CBS/NBC/PBS are jaw dropping! I have never seen anything like this. Moreover, the automatic TV tuner setup routine has picked up channels I never knew existed! Even TV-Guide channel listing info. By comparison, analog programs (Matlock and Law and Order re-runs for example) looked just "ok". Unfortunatelly, compared to the HD quality, ANY analog program will look just "ok" on this display. The biggest "probem" with this TV is that the display quality is SO good, that if you give it a sub-par input you will really be able to SEE sub-par quality. KURO's electronics will compensate, quite well mind you, but there is only so much magic that can be performed here with analog programs, in terms of noise reduction and up-conversion. I wonder how things will change when I get a "real antenna" up and running. For playback, I hooked up my $80 Sony NS72 (upconverting) DVD player. I used the HDMI connection, so that I could send 1080p upconverted signals to the KURO. Man, oh man was I stunned! Everything I threw at it came out with such gorgeous detail! Watching any of the space scenes in the Starwars movies, there was no way to tell where the top and bottom black bars started on the screen, except by looking for the point where the background stars "disappear". Watching Mary Poppins, I could see Julie's makeup on her face! I ran the HQV Silicon Optix test DVD revealing, quite clearly I am afraid, all the shortcomings of my cheap DVD player. In matters of image detail, color fidelity and contrast and cadence the KURO -and the DVD- passed with flying colors...I could not find jaggies in the flag test. The flower, boat ride, freeway and sunset scenes were stunning. The race car zooming past the stands showed moire, but this is Sony's fault! Looking at of-the-air HD car races with cars and cameras zooming/panning past stands and the like, these are rock solid images. The cadence tests reveal what happens when you display 1080p/24fps, or any number of very esoteric cadences. There is no 3:2 frame-rate nonsense with the KURO. You'll be really hard pressed to find "jaggies" in anything except perhaps a couple of cartoon or anime cadences. I am not sure how this "failure" will ever be seen in a live program. As a second battery of what I like to call graduate student checks, I connected the DVD player to the TV with the composite video cables. The DVD here does no "upconverting" to 1080p. It merely puts out the 480p progressive scan it was designed for. The KURO on the other hand has some wonderful magic here. The same movies (Starwars and Mary Poppins) were perfectly viewable, only marginally below the quality of the ones through the HDMI. So, do not feel compelled to throw away your "older" DVD player just because it is "merely" a 480p progressive scan type. For ultimate performance this TV, unfortunatelly, pretty much requires a Blu-Ray player. But I am not in any hurry yet. Last, but by no means least, I should mention the audio performance of the KURO, which is in fact closer to that of a good sound bar. When running the THX audio setup from the Starwars DVD, the speaker bar generated a clearly discernible directional sound for the L, R and C channels when the L,R and C were triggered. When the surround-L and surround-R speakers were triggered the speakerbar produced "back-firing" sounds, (from the left and right side respectively) that reflected off the wall behind the TV! This was quite astounding. The surround sound effect is quite nicely done with what is essentially a very effective phased-array approach! Congrats to the Pioneer sound engineers. This is top notch work! Triggering the "sub" produces no responce from the speakerbar. The KURO has an independent sub output, so if anyone wants to "improve" the speakerbar, a sub can be direclty linked to the TV and will provide all the low-end oomph you might desire. Clearly, having a high quality audio system generate a high quality soundstage will be a wonderful complement to the visual perfection from this TV. That being said, the current speakerbar is good enough for anyone who does not plan to do this right away. Before I sign off, I should point out that with 4-HDMI inputs, a digital audio out, and a subwoofer out, this TV in many ways eliminates the need to have an A/V receiver with more than two HDMI inputs. There are a lot of very good middle-of-the-road receivers that only have two HDMI inputs and the everyone seems to be complaining about how inadequate this is. With this KURO -and HDMI control- the TV can become the switch-board rather than the receiver. Inter-Brand and HDMI incompatibilities aside, having spent all this money on the Kuro I see no reason not to take advantage of its capabilities... This TV will spoil you... (:-