Plasma decision

K

kemicalx

Guest
G'day everyone,

Planing on getting purchasing a plasma. And i have 2 that i'm particually interested in.

The Philips 42FD9954 (here)

or the Pioneer PDP-434HDG (here)

The Philips is $2000aud cheaper than the Pioneer (give or take a bit depending on how much of a discount a can scam) Is the Pioneer worth the ~$2000aud more? Also, are there any other panels out there that are even better for under $9,500aud. ($6,650usd) It has to be 42" and as user friendly as a plasma TV can be :p

Thanks for your time,
Ashlin
 
The two you're looking at are TVs and of the plasma TVs I would say the Pioneer is the best and worth the extra (also consider Panasonic TH-42PA20 [UK code]). If you can use cable or sattelite TV as your source of pictures then you can go for a plasma monitor rather than plasma TV since the TV tuner bit is near useless (except for teletext and the woman of the house getting confused) - in which case definitely consider Panasonic plasmas TH-42PWD6 and TH-42PW6 (black and silver respectively). If you do a forum search for any of these model codes you should get billions of hits!!!
 
That post took 26 months to get here:

If panel only is your requirment their is a highdefinition (HD) panasonic TH-42PHD6 and also a new pioneer HD434mxe due here in UK shortly may already be in sunny AUS.
 
I was reccomended a Hitachi 42pd5000va what are you opinions of Hitachi in the plasma world?
 
The Philips panel was great for the price in its day. Still today it can still be called to have a great picture .. even in my store after a year of being on all day long. This panel uses fujitsu glass and fujitsu as its main oem. Although not a fujitsu lacking their scaler they are just one main manufacture for glass for PDP's. Sadly Philips has not updated this panel for so long it is being left behind. A dinosaur now, there are just better panels on the market... but still not the same price.

The Pioneer panel on the other hand was not a company that produce anything new for years... now finally we have their new panels with Deep Encased Cells that increase phosphor area by 40% or more and prevent light leakage from neighboring cells, compared to the low rows of cells used in other PDP's. Luminous efficiency is much higher than before which means the screen is much brighter... How much brighter? Well just say there is not a panel on the market today that is brighter then the new Pioneer PDP models. Also the speakers can go on the bottom or the side... woohoo!

Keep in mind, you will always get recommendations from someone to buy something. Joe says Panasonic, Bob says Samsung, blah blah.... A Pioneer is one of the few companies that produce their complete panel and now hold a crown in their new design. Contrast ratio means very little folks... Buy a TV for that you may as well buy a AMP for power. There is no math behind Contrast ratio... Any company can rate their panel at 3000.1 if they figure out how. Big numbers means big sales. The fact that no other panel on the market has the CMD rating that a Pioneer has of 1100 makes this panel hold a crown.

The only other panel I would recommend would be a Fujitsu. Almost perfectly calibrated out of the box, using the Advanced video movement this PDP produces one of the best pictures and longest lasting plasmas on the market. An inventor of plasma panels and the 2nd brightest in the world you would not go wrong with either one. Great sub to a pioneer if you do not want the stupid box. I have been selling AV components for years and personally own a 30WS ED Fujitsu for normal TV and DVD's in my bedroom... while any customer that has purchased a Fujitsu from me has had not one single complaint. Keep in mind about reviews online. Fujitsu will not sell online so you will not see many reviews good about the panel. Emmy award winning panel.. online reviews are crap do personal research.

Cya- Kevin
 
Originally posted by dimes
online reviews are crap do personal research.

Cya- Kevin

hey Kevin,

thanks for the in depth reply, the thing with doing all my own research is, i need to use the internet as i can't get a look at every panel i'm interested in, put them side by side and run the exact same signal into them.. so what i'm trying to do is use peoples opinions online to find the top 3 or 4 panels people like. Then i'll probally write up a simple score card ie,

Brightness 0-10
Colour 0-10
sharpness 0-10
and so on.

Then rate each plasma seperatly

is about the best i can think of doing.
 
When looking at a panel, that is for watching TV pictures digital/analogue the best advice is to look for grey scale and depth of picture. The Pio is almost perfect only surpassed by the panasonics for grey scale but for picture depth and colour the Pio comes up tops IMO also the model is an xga tube hdtv ready. If you are not using a panel as a tv set then follow recomendations such as the model dimes mentioned but first of you have to decide how you will be using your panel (TV or NOT)....... Then follow up by viewing said panels with sources similar to your use at home.
 

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