Digital Trends

Pioneer Elite Kuro Pro-111FD November 19th, 2008 | by David Elrich

Performance

Before getting into our tests, a few quick observations.

Even turned off, the Kuro gives a big hint as to its quality. Compared to other plasmas, there’s barely a hint of reflected light—and we set this up in a room with mixed lighting including florescent bulbs. Reflectivity is a real bugaboo with plasmas, since their displays use multiple layers of glass unlike LCD screens. That’s why we typically recommend an LCD if the set is used in a room with loads of windows and daylight. That isn’t the case at all with the Kuro—and, to a lesser degree, any new Panasonic plasma with a special anti-reflective coating.

Another big hint that speaks volumes is the fact that the set’s screen is very dark with the power off. Most others are lighter shades of gray. What this points to are excellent black levels, the foundation for great color. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

Equipment Setup

We used two key components to test the Pro-111FD—a Verizon FiOS HD/DVR cable box and a Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-ray Disc player. Before getting into some HD video, we had to put the Kuro through its initial set-up phases.

Since picture quality is what any HDTV all about, we spent a long time working through the Picture options. As the supposed king of plasma sets, the Kuro has extensive adjustment options including Optimum, Performance, Pure, Movie, Sport, Game and Standard. There are also ISF Day/Night features for those who want an outside pro to calibrate their sets. Under most of the settings are extensive submenus that let you tweak the image to your liking, or follow a DIY disk like Digital Video Essentials or Monster’s HDTV Calibration Wizard. When you’re making the adjustments, you can quickly compare tweaks when you hit the “tools” key on the remote to see before and after results.

Optimum is a very cool option and was our overall preferred choice here. It automatically adjusts the picture depending on the brightness of the room using the Room Light and Color Sensors. Pure is another good one, since it faithfully reproduces the signal sent to the screen. Of course, you can adjust a gadget freak’s worth of picture parameters, screen sizes and so on, with such modifications taking up entire chapters of the Owner’s Manual. Into Gamma and Color Space? You can make all the adjustments you’d like. Whoever thought watching a television was so complicated? (Actually it’s not, and after doing our own tweaks, we chose Optimum for watching HD channels and Blu-ray discs.)

Pioneer also knows men and women do not live on video alone, so they added a number of SRS TruSurround settings. We had gone through the trouble of attaching the speakers so this circuit was engaged as well.

Image Courtesy of Pioneer

Verizon FiOS HD

Verizon’s FiOS service delivers some of the best quality HD signals available—and don’t worry, we pay for it like everyone else, so this is an unbiased opinion. The ESPN HD feed sparkled and skin tones looked as natural as can be—not too vivid or unreal. NFL games also dazzled, and since it’s a plasma set, there’s never any issue with streaking or blurring. You don’t have to worry about response time or if the LCD uses 120Hz technology either—plasma was always way ahead of the game, and this set helps it maintain the lead.

Blu-Ray Movies

We were really impressed watching some ultimate fighters on HD Net—the skin colors, bright white mat (and, yes, even gore)—were extremely impressive. Moving to The Hills Have Eyes II, we could really see the Kuro at its best. In the one scene where the heavily-armed heroes drop into a well and the camera looks up to the night sky, the black was as inky as could be. In that creepy montage, you could easily see all the details in the shadows. Mind you, the movie was awful, but we’ve got no complaints about picture quality.

Switching to the Blu-ray player, we again used the Optimum setting and the Smooth setting in the PureCinema menu. Once done, we popped in the new Iron Man disc as well as few other favorites. Kuros have a deserved reputation for outstanding black levels, and Iron Man offered some great examples—especially when Tony Stark takes flight for the first time during a nighttime journey through the L.A. skies and past a Ferris wheel. It was a dense, inky black and lights just sparkled off the screen. The movie just looked great and even sounded quite good with the SRS delivering a decent ersatz surround effect. Other discs such as Happy Feet and Night At the Museum also proved equally engaging. We never thought that penguin feathers, or Robin Williams’ mustache, could look so detailed.

While watching various flicks, we’d also change room lighting, even turning on the overhead fluorescents just to check the results. The Kuro did not skip a beat, and there was barely a hint of reflection: Impressive results indeed. But overall, the Pro-111FD is one impressive HDTV, and it’s easy to see why it remains a standout in a sea of lesser-performing rivals.


Conclusion

There’s no question that the Pioneer Elite Kuro Pro-111FD is a new benchmark for plasma HDTVs—picture quality is that good. Thus, if money is no object, buy without reservation and you’ll be in video heaven for years to come.

But realistically, how many of us are in this situation? Even Sergey Brin and Bill Gates are watching their pennies now. If budgets are tight, the Panasonic 800 series remains a worthy alternative, but realize that the ultra-deep Kuro blacks aren’t there. Nonetheless, these sets are much better than 95% of the LCD HDTVs available (other than the new LED backlit models from Sony and Samsung, but they’re a cool $4/5K as well for 50-inchers).

In other words, with big screen flat panel HDTVs, if you want the best, you’re going to have to pay for it. Whether the Elite Kuro Pro-111FD is worth taking the plunge is the $5,000 question. The answer being that, if it were up to us, we’d definitely start saving our pesos or look for a retailer with 0% financing, since the set is that good.

Pros:

• Fabulous 1080p picture
• Deep blacks
• Little reflection of ambient room light
• Built-in image optimizer

Cons:

• So darn expensive
• Remote should be more sophisticated
• No SD card reader
• Did we mention that nosebleed price?