Topic: Pioneer
Category: Audio/Video
Tags: plasma
Technorati: Linking Blogs

This isn't exactly a product, but something rather interesting I came across while looking for news from this past week. At their announcement event for their new PDP-506HD, PDP-436HD, and PDP-436SX plasma displays, Pioneer showed the following slide:

The above photo, taken by Watch Impress, demonstrates just how far plasma displays have come in the past few years. The first row contains brightness and contrast -- as you can see, brightness for Pioneer's 50" plasma displays is 3.1 times what it was in 1997, and contrast ratio approximately 18 times better. Meanwhile, the next row contains power consumption, and you can see that it is down 29% versus the same set in 1997. The light emitting efficiency is 2.2 times better, and the actual weight of the set is down 25%. It's always nice to take a look back and see how far you've come, even if it's o­nly a period of 7 years.