Pioneer PDP-LX508D

Launch price £4,000.00

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Stuff says

Expensive but extraordinary. If God watches the telly, he does it on one of these

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Stuff.tv hot buy

Have a look round our TV reviews and you’ll be swiftly disabused of the notion that Full HD is a must-have. Other factors – contrast and ability to handle motion, for example – are equally important to picture quality. But when these basics are sorted, as they are on the LX508D, then Full HD resolution is a very nice icing on the cake.

So behold Pioneer’s flagship 50in plasma, the PDP-LX508D. It builds on the ability of the PDP-508XD in three ways: it adds a new colour filter, aimed at improving red hues, it ups its contrast ratio from 16,000:1 to an almighty 20,000:1, and it packs in over a million more pixels than its sibling.

Class-dominating picture
The results are awesome. That’s an often-misused word in the modern marketplace, but here it’s entirely appropriate. The Pioneer is as astonishingly complete and class-dominatingly capable as Bugatti’s Veyron: it does everything that anything else  in its class can do, and then takes it to a new level.

Take detail. Throw in an HD-DVD of 300, and you’ll be transfixed: if ever a movie shot in such a hyper-real style could appear ‘real’, it does here.

Colour saturation is complete, blacks appear mercilessly deep, and there’s no discernible noise on the screen. None – not even with very fast motion.