PRODUCT REVIEW: NOVEMBER 21, 2007
Pioneer Elite PRO-110FD 1080P Plasma HDTV
Pioneer’s new KURO technology takes plasma to another level. No, wait — make that another universe.
Pioneer Electronics has long been a leader in the design and manufacturing of plasma, going back to the 1990s. They were one of the first companies to launch a 50-inch model, and the first to adopt a more complex formed pixel structure instead of the conventional, lower-cost ribbed channels used by Fujitsu, Matsushita, NEC, and others.
As a result, Pioneer’s plasma monitors, and later its integrated HDTVs, were among the brightest on the market. But a consequence of higher light output was higher black levels, sometimes three times as intense as those achieved by Panasonic’s Plasmaco labs. That meant lower contrast ratios and images that just didn’t have enough punch.
While many of its competitors have given up on plasma in the past decade (NEC, Mitsubishi) or expanded into LCD technology (Samsung, LG), Pioneer has remained steadfast in its belief that plasma is and will continue to be a viable display technology for years to come — a risky stance, given the company’s record-setting $700m financial loss for fiscal 2006.
It was hardly a surprise in 2006 when Pioneer began showing its latest engineering triumph — 50-inch and 60-inch plasma HDTVs with blacks so deep and inky, you’d swear they were painted in. The official unveiling of these new KURO (Japanese for “black”) plasma sets happened this past May in New York City in a darkened nightclub with Pioneer executives dressed in dark suits for greater effect.
Figure 1a. It’s easy to tell the PRO-110FD is a member of the Elite family.
The press “ooohed” and “aaahed” as the Blu-ray clips showed deep saturated red flowers and crystal wine glasses and china plates against a velvety black background. There was definitely something different about these new plasma monitors, something that reminded me of the amazingly high contrast and inky blacks that Toshiba and Canon showed with their now-stillborn SED in early 2005 at CES.
I pondered all of this as the local freight company moved an Elite PRO-110FD Kuro 50-inch plasma into my studio. What was I really going to discover during my tests? Was there some sort of gimmickry afoot, or had Pioneer really managed to re-invent the wheel?
OUT OF THE BOX
Those readers familiar with the Elite brand know that it represents the high-end of plasma displays, both in terms of image quality and price. While the former is never a bad thing, the latter is what is causing financial pain for Pioneer as it tries to compete in the “take no prisoners” PDP price wars.
Pioneer’s design for the PRO-110FD follows that of other Elite plasma HDTVs and monitors — lots of gloss black finish and a minimum of lettering and logos. The anti-glare glass also helps to keep the screen dark when not in use, so the set definitely fits into a high-end installation.
All of the input and loop-through connections are on the rear panel, with the exception of a small strip along the left side that provides component, composite, and S-video inputs, plus a USB port and a headphone output. The USB port is for viewing still photos, which is apparently growing in popularity for many owners of big screen TVs.
Figure 1b. Here’s a look at the rear panel connections. Note the four HDMI inputs.
The rest of the connector complement is generous. You’ll find four HDMI 1.3 input jacks, an additional set of composite, S-video, and component video inputs, plus analog RCA connections for stereo audio in. There’s also a 15-pin VGA connector for PCs or older set-top receivers, two RF inputs, an IR repeater output and a Toslink digital audio output for an external AV receiver. An RS232C jack rounds things out.
There’s also an Ethernet port for connection to your PC, so you can download and watch MPEG2/4 and Windows Media videos, listen to MP3 and WAV/WMA files, and view JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, and GIF images. Pioneer calls this the Home Media Gallery, and it will work with Windows Media Connect 2.0, Windows Media Player 11 (WinXP), and Windows Media Player 11 (Vista).
To top things off, Pioneer has also included TV Guide On Screen™, which is a free electronic program guide (EPG) service that uploads data on a constant basis through a local analog terrestrial or cable TV station. TV Guide On Screen has appeared in other HDTV products from time to time, but hasn’t been in high demand.
Another way to get EPG information is to install a CableCARD into the rear-panel slot. Once activated, this will allow the PRO-110FD to show the same channel mapping information found on your local cable company’s set-top boxes.
The built-in amplifier is rated at 17 watts per channel and incorporates SRS technology for virtual surround sound. The speakers are vertically mounted alongside the edges of the monitor and do an acceptable job for everyday TV viewing. You’ll want to use your true surround system for serious movie watching, though.
Figure 2. Now, this is a nice remote, even if it has three redundant buttons
for displaying TV channel information.
REMOTE AND MENUS
The PRO-110FD’s remote control has a sensible button layout — not too many, and not too small. It’s one I could become familiar enough with to use behind my back, or in a darkened room. It has direct access to all seven video inputs (hooray!) as well as the PC input.
You can also save and access four favorite TV channels and there are three different buttons to push to find out what channel you’re watching — one marked “TV Guide” for the TV Guide On Screen menu, one marked “Info” that also shows a channel banner and TV Guide data for the selected channel, and a third button labeled “Display” that also displays channel information. (A little redundancy there?)
When used with a DVD player, the TV Guide button accesses the player’s top menu, while the “home Menu’ button works for the TV’s main menu and a DVD player’s movie menu. Another button takes you into the Home Media Gallery system, and it’s located just below the enormous mouse disk.
Yet another button lets you access an HDMI Control Menu. Here, you can define and operate many functions on HDMI-equipped peripherals, such as red laser and blue laser DVD players, AV receivers, and DVRs. Pioneer states that only HDMI 1.3-compliant products and cables should be used with this system (CEC).
Let’s move on to menus. Over the past couple of years, Pioneer has been persuaded to move many of its service menu-only adjustment (like color temperature) out into the open, where they are a heck of a lot easier to access. No more standing on your head, pushing three buttons on the remote simultaneously, and counting to 7.5 while powering up the TV to make a quick white balance adjustment!
In addition to the basic adjustments, Pioneer also provides six image presets (Optimum, Standard, Dynamic, Movie, Pure, Game) and one User memory in which you can save all of your settings for each input. That’s a total of eight different memories. You’ll also find six different aspect ratios including a 1:1 (dot by dot) setting to eliminate overscan with 1920x1080 content.
As usual, there are five different factory color temperature settings. As usual, I didn’t use any of them, opting to set my own and save those settings in User mode, using the RGB High and Low settings as baselines to get started.
For color accuracy, Pioneer lets you fine-tune the hue of the three primaries (RGB) and three secondaries (CMY) in a Color Management menu. Unlike some color management options that only affect saturation, this system of sliders lets you pull colors very close to specific values within a standard gamut like SMPTE-C or BT709. How close? You’ll see shortly.
In the Pro Adjust menu, you’ll find three different PureCinema modes (Off, Standard, Smooth, and Advance) for interlaced content. These are disabled with progressive-scan signals, and I should mention here that the PRO-110FD can accept 1080p24 as well as 1080p60 content from blue laser discs.
You’ll also find Text Optimization on/off, three levels of dynamic contrast enhancement, a black level setting (0 or 7.5 IRE), Color Transient Improvement on/off, Auto Contrast on/off, high frequency detail enhancement in three steps, and three gamma curve presets, each of which (unfortunately) results in an S-curve gamma.
But that’s not all, as they say in TV commercials. You’ll also have access to four levels of 3D noise reduction with analog signals, three levels of field noise reduction (performed on each field of an interlaced signal, not just frames), and two digital noise reduction modes — Block and Mosquito Noise, both MPEG encoding artifacts.
Pioneer is also trying to be “green” with energy saving menu selections, one of which turns off the TV if no signal is detected at any input for 15 minutes. The other mode shuts down everything if no operation (remote commands) is detected after 3 hours. You can turn either of these on, or off.
ON THE TEST BENCH
To say I gave the PRO-110FD a workout is an understatement. I watched both terrestrial and cable HD programming through the internal tuner and external set-top receivers, played several red laser DVDs through the component and HDMI inputs (including the Realta HQV and Ovation Avia Pro test discs), performed color calibration and gamut mapping with my AccuPel generator, and finished things off with two of my favorite blue laser movies for checking color accuracy, flesh tones, and shadow detail — Batman Begins on HD DVD, and Ghost Rider: Director’s Cut on Blu-ray.
Because there are so many ways to set up the PRO-110FD, I opted to go directly to the User menu and do a ground-up calibration. Right off the bat, I had a problem with S-curve gammas no matter what I did to set brightness and contrast at reasonable levels. And there’s no way to adjust gamma settings in the general menus, which is odd considering everything else you have access to.
Figure 3. Here are four gamma curve plots for the PRO-110FD.
Not a single one is immune from white crush.
After screwing around with contrast and gamma combinations for nearly an hour, I came up with two settings that I could live with, although they weren’t perfect. Figure 2 shows my last two calibrations, along with the PRO-110FD’s factory Pure and Gamma #3 settings. All four curves track nicely until they hit 80 nits, which is when everything seems to go awry.
The PRO-110FD isn’t a particularly bright plasma HDTV. I measured brightness at 50.5 nits (14.8 ft-L) with a full white screen after calibration. That’s about 32% dimmer than the same measurement I took with Pioneer’s PRO-FHD1 back in February of 2007. Small area white readings peaked out at 163.5 nits, also low compared to the PRO-FHD1 (204 nits).
So there’s one possible explanation for Pioneer’s attempt to lower black levels — additional filtering and/or polarization in the front glass. My guess seems to be supported by the reduced vertical viewing angles I measured, with brightness dropping by as much as 65% when measured 45 degrees above and below the PRO-110FD’s centerline. Contrast those numbers with the 30% drop-off I measured on a competitor’s 50-inch 1080p plasma monitor (70 full screen nits brightness, 210 nits small area).
Well, how about those black levels? They’re low, all right. To be more specific, they’re almost half of what I’ve seen on the best plasma displays I’ve tested previously, with the average black level measured at .055 nits using a 16-block checkerboard pattern in Standard mode.
The resulting contrast numbers were 1082:1 ANSI (average) and 1524:1 peak. A sequential contrast test (small white area followed by no signal) measured 2291:1, and you can believe that number, not the 30,000:1 marketing hogwash that is so common nowadays.
Those black level numbers are simply amazing, and blow by the best CRT displays I’ve been fortunate to test over the years. In fact, they are just about at the lower limit of accuracy for my test equipment. So the PRO-110FD does live up to its KURO moniker.
Figure 4. Once you get above 20 IRE, the PRO-110FD tracks a very consistent grayscale.
Let’s recap: We’ve got great contrast, super low black levels, lower-than-normal brightness, and unmanageable gamma curves. The next step was to look at how color temperature tracked, and the PRO-110FD did very well above 20 IRE. The factory PURE calibration, while extremely stable from 30 IRE on up, was just too cold, averaging 8515K.
As you can see in Figure 3, I was able to tame that down to an average of 6547K with a maximum shift of just 203 degrees across the grayscale from 20 IRE to 100 IRE. That’s superlative performance — I’m usually happy if I don’t see a shift exceeding 500 degrees. The maximum shift across a full white screen is even smaller at 183 degrees, so the color of white stays that way no matter where your eye happens to be looking.
The last test was to measure the color gamut in both color space modes. Out of the box, I measured almost perfect coverage of the BT709 HDTV color space (Figure 4). But I couldn’t resist the temptation to play with the color management controls and wound up with the gamut shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Here’s the PRO-110FD’s color space right out of the box…
Figure 6. …And here’s what it looked like after I tweaked the color management tools.
Figure 7. Although the color gamut can be expanded,
it needs more green saturation to cover the DCI standard gamut.
The PRO-110FD nailed the coordinates for red, green blue, yellow, and magenta, coming up just a bit short in cyan as I pulled the green coordinate towards yellow. In essence, I cleaned up the blue and red, got yellow, green, and magenta on target, but lost a bit of accuracy with cyan. Well, 5 out of 6 ain’t bad.
Intrigued by the expanded color space option, I turned it on and compared it to the digital cinema (DCI) space as seen in Figure 6. While a “good try,” the PRO-110FD comes up short to almost every color coordinate except red when operating in this space. No doubt most of that could be cleaned up in the color management menu, except for the green channel saturation.
IMAGE QUALITY
This product is tailor-made for HD content, so I cut to the chase and started with Ghost Rider, viewing it both in Pure and User modes with 1080p/24 output from a Samsung BD-P1200 player. In a dark room, my experience was like sitting towards the back of a movie theater. That’s how filmic the images were, with great shadow detail, high contrast when needed, great flesh tones, and fired up reds and oranges.
This movie has a lot of black, blue, silver, white, and orange in it, and plenty of high contrast nighttime scenes. But it’s also got a few carnival-like scenes where Nicholas Cage is a stunt motorcyclist, jumping over buses and cars with his bright red, yellow, and white jumpsuit. No matter, everything looked just like a first-run 35mm release print (without the scratches and dirt, of course!).
Next up? Batman Begins, also a great test HD DVD for high contrast, dark scenes, multiple shades of black and gray, and subtle flesh tones and pastel colors. Jump right to the chase scene through Gotham City, where the Batmobile drops off the radar and then appears again, as police try to keep up the chase. Also check out the nighttime shots of the Narrows and the Scarecrow’s lair in the mental hospital.
The HD DVD — PRO-110FD combination had great shadow details, plenty of texture detail from raindrops, and did the “puke green” hospital wall paint shades justice. In contrast, Wayne Manor had a pleasing warm look to it from all of the low-level incandescent lighting and candles, as did the guests at Bruce Wayne’s big party
I should stop here and tell you that I shut every one of Pioneer’s enhancements off for these and the rest of my tests. That meant no noise reduction (analog or digital), no color transient enhancement, no black stretch or contrast enhancement, and no dynamic contrast. Maybe you’ll need those for analog SD signals, but they’ll just muck things up with HD programs. As for bandwidth, the PRO-110FD did just fine with luminance multiburst patterns all the way to 37.5 MHz, using both 1080i and 720p analog signals.
For fun, I popped in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which features colors good enough to eat. The candy-apple reds really looked red, which is no minor achievement for plasma displays that tend to produce a warm (orange) red. The greens were more yellow than cyan, unlike the PRO-FHD1. And yellows just had a nice amber tint to them instead of looking like lemons.
How about test patterns? The PRO-110FD had some problems with the Realta HQV HD DVD disc (1080i output, no processing) that manifested as jitter during the film resolution loss test and the pan of Raymond James Stadium. I also saw some “beating” on multiburst patterns in the 20 to 25 MHz range, which would indicate some high frequency roll-off was occurring.
As for red laser DVD, this HDTV didn’t do all that well with the Realta HQV rotating bars and waving flag tests, leaving too many interlaced scan line artifacts and “jaggies” to suit my tastes. The Super Speedway sequence showed that 3:2 detection is slow to kick in, taking almost a full second each time. But the PRO-110FD did pick up on several oddball film-to-video cadences cleanly, even if it couldn’t handle VariSpeed 3-2-3-2-2.
You will see some scaling artifacts (aliased edges) with 480i and 480p content. The only way to avoid ‘em is to turn down the sharpness control and shut down any other edge enhancement settings. Believe it or not, I also saw some minor scaling artifacts with 720p content from ABC’s World News Tonight and the local 720p news telecast from WPVI-DT.
CONCLUSIONS
There’s no question that Pioneer has accomplished something of significance here. The question is, did they raise the bar for plasma, or push it sideways? To be sure, the PRO-110FD does produce the lowest black levels of any plasma or CRT display I’ve ever seen, and it provides very high contrast images with plenty of dynamic range in doing so. But brightness has been sacrificed, and apparently so have vertical axis viewing angles.
Even so, the PRO-110FD’s color accuracy and quality are just astounding, particularly when you compare its image quality to that of same-size LCD HDTVs. The color points in this set are so close to the BT-709 standard that I wouldn’t hesitate to use this as a reference monitor for color grading and correction for broadcast HD programs — if it wasn’t for those doggone S-curve gamma plots that can’t be user-corrected.
Power consumption test: In an 8-hour test with SD and HDTV content and the plasma set to Standard operating mode, the PRO-110FD consumed 408.8 watts on average and a total of 2.852 kWh of electricity.
