Pioneer Plasma LX5090, Philips 479664 or Samsung UE46B8000 ! Need upright and sincere advice for my Home Cinema Madness

[Zubkabera]

Need quick advice I can get either set for 2000 Euro, majority of my sources are SD but have PS3 and may be in near future will move to HD satbox. I have hundreds of SD DVD and but very few HD disks.

I know LCDs are catching up and in recent Awards LCD dominated and Pioneer was not featured at all, not sure if it was due to weak marketing campaign or some other reason but need sincere advice if Pioneer will beat Samsung 8000 or even Philip 9664 on picture quality for both SD and HD sources.

I don't care about DLNA and Internet features as I will hook up Apple TV and PS3. Thank you in advance.

 

[v1c]

Pioneer pulled out of making TV's so that is why not featured anymore. Still the best for what you want it for get it while you can. Probably not a vast difference in HD picture between sets although the pioneer will look more natural (some people prefer the artificial look of LCD) but i'm pretty sure the pioneer will be much better for SD material. The other plus is it's the bigger of the screens you have mentioned. The pioneer is a legend of TV sets and universally praised by every review written that i have read. Nothing wrong with your other choices but the pioneer is still the one to beat.

 

[Anonymous]

Second that - get the Pioneer while you still can.
I finally got mine Saturday and am so glad I did, it really is the best out there.
I kept putting the purchase off hoping for something better to arrive on the scene but it hasn't.

 

[Clare Newsome]

Yep, if you can still find one of the Pioneers, go for it. We still use it as our reference TV, and if we'd been confident there were enough stocks in the market (which there clearly are not) it would have been an Award winner again. It was only its discontinued status that precluded it from being named best set of the year.

Now that's not to say the likes of the Samsung and Philips are much worse - far from it, they're almost as good (and certainly in terms of some features, better) than the Pioneer. And some people prefer the bright-whites and lower power-consumption of the LCD sets.

Next year (just as Pioneer themselves predicted) we'd expect to see sets that finally surpass the standard set by the Kuros.

 

[Zubkabera]

Thank you all for your swift and extremely useful response, and apologies for my ignorance why Pioneer is no longer contender for awards.

But that really brought another concern about Pioneer policy on warranty, here in Europe we get 2 years standard warranty for TVs now if Pioneer is not making Plasma anymore how they will support any issue arises during these two years. Second questions which is not answered is how Pioneer deals in upscaling SD contents compare to Samsung and Philips, I read Samsung is better in this regard but it doesn't support native scart connection and my Satbox still has a scart or S-Video connection only

.

I saw Samsung demo in action which was unbelievable gorgeous but they were running their own PC based video while Pioneer was running normal blu-ray disk and I got floored on Pioneer because of smooth and lovely picture and would definitely go for pioneer if SD upscaling and warranty issues are sorted out.

Thanks once again for helping me with your valuable time and expertise.

 

[Clare Newsome]

Although Pioneer has stopped making/will stop selling TVs, it will continue to support them for full warranty periods - as we wrote in the original news story:

Pioneer says it "will continue to provide after-sales
services [for display products] even after the withdrawal", a statement
from Pioneer GB adding that "the company will continue to honour
warranties and after-sales services."

As for upscaling - we've yet to see a TV that upscales better than the Kuros. Normally, for example, we'd recommend upscaling DVDs via your Blu-ray player rather than your TV, but (depending on your player/receiver) the Kuro is the exception to this.