PDP4350HD 43 Inch PureVision Plasma Television review

Color, on the other hand, is this plasma's strongest suit. Nearly perfect color decoding, combined with good grayscale tracking, gives the panel extremely accurate color reproduction if set up properly. Even without any professional calibration, the color performance of the PDP-4350HD straight out of the box is quite good compared to most other plasmas we've reviewed. The grayscale in the Low color temperature setting was actually somewhat minus blue rather than way too blue, which is the norm from most plasma panels (see geek box below for more).

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this panel's performance is its inability to produce dark-enough blacks. Black areas of the picture appeared dark gray rather than inky black, robbing the image of much impact, especially when viewed in a darkened home theater.

The panel's video processing is good, but the aforementioned Advanced setting under Pure Cinema in the Pro Adjust menu (the so-called 3:3 pull-down setting, said to reduce jutter) actually introduced more artifacts than did the Standard setting (which engages standard 2:3 pull-down). We compared the two settings during the difficult opening of Star Trek: Insurrection and saw more jagged lines and image instability with Advanced engaged; we definitely prefer the look of standard 2:3 pull-down.

We looked at the Advanced setting with our DVD player set to interlaced mode, but Pioneer has unfortunately allowed the processing to be active even when the 4350HD is fed a progressive-scan signal, which results in even more artifacts. Since most people will be using a progressive-scan DVD player anyway, this is a potentially serious design flaw that we hope Pioneer fixes in future models. Speaking of processing, we also preferred to leave the other picture settings, including noise reduction, DRE, and CTI, turned off for critical viewing.

After an ISF-style calibration, we spun up some of our favorite DVD movie titles. The opening scenes of Alien revealed muddy gray-looking blacks, along with a significant amount of visible low-level noise (it looked like roiling motes in the black areas). The opening scenes of Pirates of the Caribbean looked quite good, with awesome color saturation, but even in these relatively bright scenes, there was some visible noise. Skin tones looked really natural, a benefit of accurate color decoding and linear grayscale tracking.

Turning to high-def, Behind Enemy Lines from our JVC HM-DH3000U D-VHS deck looked mostly excellent. Again color saturation and skin tone rendition were exceptional. There was some visible noise though, even in brighter scenes with the HD content.