PeterHerz:the_lhc:PeterHerz:
@maxflinn - I think one should take care not to compare low/mid-end with high-end. You wouldnt compare a Fiat Punto with a Porche, you wouldnt demand and expect the quality in a Fiat Punto. You get what you pay for.
The Pioneer plasma were high-end plasmas, like the Panasonic Z1, the B&O plasma models, at prices of 4K and up.
No they weren't Peter, I paid slightly more than the RRP for my KRP-500a and I still paid less than 2.5k for it. Even the 60" models didn't cost 4k (IIRC).
The Pioneer dealer I bought it from told me that a senior sales exec reckoned they would have had to charge 5k+ for them in order to actually make a profit but the market just wouldn't allow it.
At the end they were sold for a bargain
You don't appear to be listening, the price I paid was full price and then some, the 50" 9G Kuros were NEVER sold for £4k. Never. I also don't recall ANY 9G Kuro being sold for less than the RRP, certainly not while official stocks were still available. A year or more later, who knows, I wasn't looking but given that someone on here was talking about picking up a KRP-500a off ebay for £2200 (£1500 for the screen, £700 for the media box) it doesn't seem to me that the prices have come down much.
like the Z1 is now sold for around 1.2K. The Philips 21:9 was 4K one year ago, Richtersounds sell is now for less than 1K - selling out of the stock - but they are still what I will call high-end despite the sell-out. And yes - you touch a delicate issue - the Pioneer was never that high-end in terms of product design, quality, brushed aluminium
Looks a sight better than most TVs do, the remote with mine is anodised aluminium, weighs a ton (well it doesn't obviously but it hurts when an 18 month old throws it at you...). The grey KRP-500 looked very good but the missus wanted black luckily (as they were more expensive).
and never came even close to B&O and the Z1 in that respect
I'd disagree wrt to the latter, as far as the former is concerned it doesn't matter what it looks like, the picture quality doesn't compare in any way (The Pioneer dealer I bought from is also a B&O dealer and the 15k plasma they were selling at the time wasn't as good, in terms of picture quality, as the KRP is. I spent a long time looking at them.).
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