Ymegod said:
Ganja my man, whilst agreeing 100% with Ryan re ; judging a plasma screen using Toy Story et al you have to be careful not to criticise the Holy Grail of plasmas on this Forum.
Check the kit list of both Ryan and gizlaroc and you will see that which I mean.
I wasn't going to entertain you with a reply to that, but, I have changed my mind, so......
I originally went to buy a Plasma for TV viewing, and took a day out to go and see the Pioneer MXe1 vs the 433, after spending a while looking at them I decided that I actually prefered the look of the Panasonic that was also there, which is what I ended up buying. This was back in June.
With all the talk of HD and hdmi I decedied a few weeks ago to give the Pioneer another go, the 435XDE. My mate has one and asked if I could go round and try and tweak his set, he had bought it after selling his panny PW5 and couldn't get it looking right, I took this opportunity to take over a load of discs that I know very well and I have used to get various crt projectors, lcd projectors and dlp projectors looking great, as well as my PW6, and have a good play with teh Pioneer.
First thing was the colour, it was far too hot, but after knocking it right down it looked alot better, although there was to much green in the image but we got rid of that, the contrast is way over the top as well, but you can knock it back to usable levels without killing whites too badly. Once this was done the image was pretty good, and my only concern were the blacks, or lack of.
(this was using his DV79 btw.)
No matter what you do the pioneer cannot do blacks, as soon as you get to a dark scene the whole thing for me falls apart, that 3d snap is gone and I am distracted knowing that it just isn't right. I am sure that alot of people would not be bothered by this though, as they have probably never seen what it is meant to look like. Overall though the image was pretty nice and I could live with it, but would not swap my Panasonc for it.
Then we put sky on. Oh Dear!!
It looked a mess, anything other than a brightly lit and motionless studio shot looked terrible, we played with all the settings but we could not get it looking right, there was what I can only describe as a sort of smearing of colours, like you used to get on the very first lcd computer monitors. And my god, if you like sport then you are buggered, the players in football left a trail as well as the ball.
And I am sure there is some sort of frame rate conversion going on with this panel as the motion is not exactly the smoothest I have seen.
He sold his pw5 for £800 and paid just short of £3k for the 435xde, and to say he was gutted is some what of an understatement. Luckily he knows the place he bought it from very well and they swapped it for a viera that his father has had, and he bought himself an hd7.
I still wanted to get away from Panasonic and get something that was HD compatible, and after reading all the glowing reviews on the new NEC HD models on the avsforums I decided to go for one of those, so I sold my Panasonic and ordered the NEC.
You can search for my opinion on the NEC, again I thought comapred to the Panasonic it looked processed, and again it could not do blacks! I spent a week trying to get the most out of it and I still didn't like it, so I sold it for a £500 loss and bought another Panasonic, an HD6.
I have no reason to prefer the Pansonic over the Pioneer, and with the Pioneer I love the way it has a media box for all the connections, and the way it supports all the Hi-Def resolutions straight out the box, and it is one of the best designs I have ever seen on a tv but at the end of the day quite simply the Panasonic screens have a much better image, you will need to add a scaler for HD, and the thing is pig ugly hanging on the wall, but the picture is in a different league to the Pioneer, and, that to me is more important than all the above.
So yes, I am biased towards the Panny because it is a better screen. Simple as that. And everyone I know who has spent any time with both of these screens says the same thing.