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- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 7 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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3.0 stars
"Good Picture, but Good Riddens, Pioneer"
Pros: Inky blacks, detachable speakers - a rare but very welcome feature for those who use the TV only as a monitor, and like to have a picture-frame style wall-mounted plasma.
Cons: The TV tuner is GARBAGE. I have had a better cable TV tuner experience with every VCR I've owned since the 80's. Slow to warm up, slow to react, and much slower to initially find all available stations (an hour or more?). Very limited pic tweaks.
Summary: This was a definite step-up from my 2004 50" Panasonic monitor. But the tuner is so pathetic on the Kuro that I use this huge display for nothing but DVD. The black levels on the Kuro put the old Panasonic to shame, without a doubt. But c'mon, you can't change channels for the first 10 seconds while it 'warms up'(it actually announces this on-screen if you try). And you have to CHANGE INPUTS on the remote to go from digital TV to analog TV. I'm used to scrolling thru analog/digital cable, but now I have to choose one or the other. Totally stupid. Pioneer probably has great engineering reasons for this (i.e. it is an artifact of running the TV on a version of the Linux operating system, etc) but I don't want excuses- I want a channel-changing experience similar to the last three decades of my life, which I have been able to get from HD-digital tuners from Motorola and LG since 2004. And Pioneer comes along and revolutionizes black levels, and then takes us back to the stone ages with the tuner. Hilarious. I have also been bugged by the swarn-of-bees effect that I see when I am 2ft from the screen. This is not a normal viewing distance, so I don't knock it down for that, but I am able to view high-res photos off a thumb drive with this TV, so I feel I should be able to get a little closer than recommended TV viewing distance when looking at my 10megapixel fmily photos, right?!? When you get close, the pixels look like they are vibrating, moving around as though you are watching valence electrons hop from shell to shell or something. My Panny never gave me this effect. Is this a side-effect of the Kuro technology? I can't help but think even though I can't explicitly see it from a seated distance, that this pixel-vibration is in some way affecting my sense of image detail. Oh, and the wide screen effects are just as terrible as my Panny - enough with the fish-eye lens, where you stretch only the far LEFT and RIGHT of the screen. Is anyone fooled by this? Dot-for-dot for DVD/Blu-Ray/HD and Zoom for SD content (to fill the screen without unnatural aspect ratio stretch). Forget everything else - otherwise it's like using 'Concert Hall' effect on a Dolby Digital movie - why mess with the origianl material? You can't make it better - the best processing can only make it 'different'. The worst processing will definitely degrade it.
But hey, a 60" Kuro delivered into my home for under three grand, I'm not wouldn't even think of sending it back. I love watching movies on this thing, but this unit is far from perfect.
Where to buy
Pioneer Kuro PDP-6020FD:
$3,499.00 - $4,599.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$4,599.95 | Yes |
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$3,569.18 | Yes |
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$3,499.00 | Yes |
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