With its digital cable readiness and Passport electronic program guide (EPG), Pioneer's 50-inch PDP-5045HD PureVision plasma TV represents the state-of-the-art from head to toe. Its perfectly flat, high-contrast, high-brightness (1,000 cd/m2) display benefits from high-quality engineering and innovative Pioneer enhancement technologies. With a plasma screen you get vivid colors like you've never seen before, extremely wide viewing angles (wider, even, than those of most LCD screens), and easy placement due to a plasma monitor's slim profile--the PDP-5045HD is a mere 3.9 inches deep, perfect for desk or wall mounting. Brightness tends to be extremely uniform across plasma screens, which are also impervious to the picture distortion and negative color balances that afflict CRT monitors when placed near lighting or sound systems.
The PDP-5045HD is packaged with a stand-alone media receiver equipped with an ATSC terrestrial HDTV tuner and a full set of interfaces, including a next-generation High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI). This all-digital, high-bandwidth interface can transfer huge amounts of pure, digital data at very fast rates.
The media receiver is compatible with high-definition terrestrial broadcast transmissions as well as NTSC (standard definition) broadcasts, both of which factor into the set's 2-tuner PIP (picture-in-picture) performance. The media receiver also manages an array of inputs, including satellite, cable, DVD, DVR/VCR, and computer signals up to wide XGA (1,280 x 768).
In the PDP-5045HD, each individual lamp is encased in its own deep "cell," with walls on all sides so light can't bleed into neighboring cells. This energy-efficient design allows each lamp to deliver a more concentrated beam of light, rendering truer colors and brighter images. Pioneer also places patented Black Stripe light-absorbing coating between each row of plasma cells. This nearly doubles the effective contrast.
Pioneer PureDrive ensures a pure digital signal path from source to image. With PureDrive, an analog broadcast is converted once to digital and remains in the digital domain until viewing. All incoming digital signals go through no analog-to-digital conversion. By minimizing or eliminating the A/D or D/A conversions, Pioneer reduces various kinds of digital "noise."
Advanced PureCinema maintains faithful and accurate reproduction of film-based content. Pioneer was the first to introduce advanced film detection using 3:3 film-to-video conversion at 72 Hz in a plasma display. This renders film content smoothly and naturally, closer to what you'd see in a movie theater. Previously, televisions offered only 3:2 film-to-video conversion at 60 Hz, which--while still a great improvement over unprocessed video--nevertheless resulted in visible onscreen artifacts, such as slightly uneven motion.
Pioneer's Advanced Continuous-Emission display technology II (ACE II) represents another first, eliminating false contours that can appear in close-ups of faces. This improved 10-bit processing allows the television to display smooth transitions from dark to light areas without losing detail or compromising the image contrast. ACE II works with PureDrive to permit the set to display more than a billion colors.
You can position the set on a table or mount it to the wall, and it's designed to accent almost any home decor. The black frame and silver, side-mounted speakers are sure to elicit admiration from friends and family, but the true high-definition picture is likely to make the lasting impact.
Connections abound: choose from 16 digital and analog terminals, including dual HDMI and IEEE 1394 (i.Link) connections, a front-panel RGB jack for easy connection to a PC or Macintosh output, and a range of composite-, component-, and S-video inputs. S-video/composite-video/RF tuner outputs foster hookup with ancillary devices such as DVRs or VCRs. The set also includes side-mounted speakers and a tabletop stand that swivels.
What's in the Box
Plasma panel, media receiver, 2 speakers, a swivel stand, a smart remote control, remote batteries, a remote stand (with 4 mounting screws), 4 screw-hole caps, a 3-meter digital connection cable, a 1.8-meter VCR controller, 2 AC power cords, 3 speaker cushions, 3 bead bands, 3 speed clamps, a cleaning cloth, 1 RF coaxial AV cable, a user's manual, and warranty information.
