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Pioneer to Stop Making Plasma TVs

by Tim Stevens on March 7, 2008 at 08:51 AM

Pioneer Stops Producing Plasma Panels

In the battle for thin-panel television supremacy, the plasma display for many years has been the superior choice, relying on individual pockets of excitable gas to produce bright colors and rich blacks. But ever since the upstart LCD panel display came into the HDTV market, it's been gradually nipping at plasma's heels, and, after years of refinements, has finally started to offer similar visual performance at lower price and in a much lighter package. This has meant bad news for the plasma industry, with the latest blow being word that Pioneer, one of the leading plasma manufacturers, will stop making plasma panels.

Pioneer will still sell its well-respected Kuro series plasma displays, known for being some of the best on the market. But it will no longer actually manufacture the panels used inside of those sets, instead turning to a third-party (in this case, Panasonic). What this means for the cost and quality of these sets remains to be seen. If Panasonic makes the panels but adds Pioneer's excellent video processing and other technologies, perhaps the Pioneer that many videophiles (including us) know and love will live on. Or maybe Pioneer will figure out some way to give us in LCDs what we loved in its plasmas, since the company plants to start releasing Kuro-branded LCDs televisions this Fall.

So, sorry plasma lovers. It's quite possible that your format of choice is going the way of HD-DVD. With any luck, though, the new crop of Organic Light Emitting Diode or OLED televisions, which deliver even brighter colors and deeper blacks than plasmas, will be inexpensive enough to fill the void in a few years.

From Engadget

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Tags: HDTV, Pioneer, Plasma

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