Buying a Pioneer Plasma Television
Pioneer Plasma Television - History
The very first plasma television was invented in 1964 at the University of Illinois by Professors Donald Bitzer, Gene Slottow, and then graduate student Robert Wilson. These gentlemen used regular televisions as computer monitors for their in-house computer network, although they knew a cathode-ray display has to constantly refresh, which is bad for displaying computer graphics. After countless hours of research, they were able to build the first plasma display panel, which only had one cell. Today's plasmas use millions of cells.
Pioneer Plasma Television vs. LCD
Looking at a plasma television and an LCD television sitting next to each other, you would not have even a hint that they operated differently because they look identical. The only other thing they have in common is they both contain around two million pixels that constitute a "full HD" 1080p image.
Pioneer Plasma Television - Kuro
Pioneer's Plasma newest plasma televisions are called their Kuro series; Kuro meaning black in Japanese. This new series of plasma televisions are designed to deliver the deepest blacks of any television on the market, a feat that sounds easier than it actually is.
Pioneer Plasma Television - Operation
Plasmas break pixels into sealed red, green, and blue sub-pixels, or cells that contain an inert gas. When an electric current, a by-product of the video signal, excites the gas, the colored phosphors in each sub-pixel begin to glow. By exciting each sub-pixel to the desired level, the signal determines the pixel's exact color and brightness. By putting enough of these pixels close enough together, an image is created.
To stay ready to respond to the signal, plasma cells remain partially on at all times; meaning that some light is inevitable, even when the signal tells the cell it wants the color black to be emitted. Pioneer has re-engineered its sets to reduce this "idling" brightness by 80%. The result is mind-boggling, with the blackest blacks ever being produced in the history of television. They tend to be a little expensive, but the picture quality is fantastic.
Pioneer Plasma Television vs. Samsung
A few months after the release of Pioneer's Kuro plasma television sets, Samsung released the first of its affordable LED-backlit LCD panels. No less critical an advance for LCD; these television sets replace the fluorescent backlight with an LED array. Samsung's processing allows the normally full-frame, full-on backlight to be turned off or dimmed on the fly in certain areas of the screen to accommodate the dark parts of the image. This means less light leakage through the liquid crystals in their shuttered state, thus blacker blacks are produced.
