Pioneer PDP-508XD 50 inch Plasma Television Review

Pioneer has stuck to what they know best with the PDP-508XD, they have produced another high end plasma TV that looks as good as it performs. Unfortunately they have also stayed with the premium price point (£2500).

Design

With Pioneer you can always expect to see a good looking TV which is well made and won’t fall to bits after a couple of years. The PDP-508XD is no exception the build quality is excellent, only the highest quality materials have been used in its production. The front is a high gloss piano black, there are no speakers on the PDP-508XD to spoil the screen's clean lines.

Features

The PDP-508XD promises to offer deeper black levels than we have previously seen in any LCD or Plasma TV. This new 8th generation screen has been labeled as the"Kuro" at Pioneer, Kuro means black in Japanese. Pioneer boasts that the black levels are 80% deeper than any other flat screen available. To back up the picture quality Pioneer has added lots of connection points including 3 HDMI’s, 3 x Scarts, Component Video,Composite Video, S-Video and a USB port.

Pioneer has use its Pure Drive 2HD picture processing technology which helps to eliminate noise and smooth fast motion. There is also so I-clear Drive which uses multi bit video processing to increase the amount of colour graduations that should result in a clearer less jagged picture.

Performance

We will have a full review of the performance in the coming weeks but we expect it to be excellent.