CES 2009

Pioneer’s current Kuro plasmas may be the hot ticket this year, but there’s more in store. It isn’t sure when we’ll see the result of the company’s latest design effort, the Extreme Contrast Concept, in stores. I’m hoping for this time next year, because this is what we have all been waiting for: blacks as dark and rich as the very best CRTs of the past. No, not as good. Even better.

For the demo were ushered into a totally black room. With the lights down, the curtains were opened and we could see the dim gray outlines of three current Pioneer plasmas without a signal. Then the images came on, they were typical of the current Pioneers. That is to say, as good as it gets in a set you can actually buy today. But there was a space between the sets, and it turned out that that space held a prototype result of the new research concept design. But you couldn’t tell the set was on; the space was a black hole.

To make a long story short, there was a Pioneer plasma in that space, and it was displaying a completely black image. You could not see even the faintest outlines of the screen. And when it finally displayed an image, the black areas of the screen stayed completely black. Images of goldfish on a field of black appeared to be floating in space. Black bars on 2.35:1 films were totally black. Tech types will know what this means: both the peak contrast and the ASNSI contrast were state-of-the-art. This is, in fact, even better performance than a CRT (CRTs usually had mediocre ANSI contrast.

Please, Pioneer, bring us these sets ASAP. And don’t compromise their black level performance just to make the images a little brighter to jump out in the showroom. Or, if you must, either restrict the compromise to the standard, non-Elite models, or give us two operating modes: Showroom and Home Theater.