So I was out looking at more TV’s today, because the subject of plasma vs. LCD remains confounding. It’d be nice to see a few plasmas up close, because so far all the plasmas I’ve seen have been hooked up to fuzzy component inputs run through several splitters. They’ve looked uniformly terrible, so it was decided to visit a high-end TV store that specializes in Pioneer plasma screens…
First of all it was great seeing their nicely-tuned plasmas up close, the trip itself was well worth it. I learned a lot about my preferences, but I’ll have to make another post some day about the general plasma vs. LCD issue. This post is specifically about the Pioneer sets we saw today. Because I realized I’d never buy one. A Pioneer monitor that is. And my reasoning for not wanting Pioneer? Lack of 1080p. All the TVs we saw were limited to 1024×768 and the salesguy started in on some rant that this was a good thing. Because, he said, the Pioneer picturequality is just so much better than anything else.
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Now to be fair the Pioneer did looked great, and if you’re watching a movie at three or four meters on a 50″ screen 1080p doesn’t really give you a whole lot. I get that. I know that resolution isn’t everything and 1080p is not always relevant. But c’mon, at that price I expect to get it all. 1024×768 may be valid for movies, but what happens when I want to hook up a PC or console? You can sure as heck see the difference in that case, so high resolution really does matter. And you can get a Panasonic 1080p plasma for €1300, so they don’t even have to be super expensive.
But look, it’s even simpler than that: The fabled Pioneer picturequality sounds like a bunch of hooey, it looked good but so do all the other brands at that price. At the end of the day they expect me to pay thousands of Euros for a monitor that has the resolution of my twelve year old 14″ CRT?! No I think not, sir. I like to move forward when possible, not go back by over a decade