Pioneer PDP-4270HD

The Future Looks Bright

I recently had the opportunity to spend a short amount of time with Pioneer’s seventh generation plasma television. Residing at the bottom of Pioneer’s reputable line of plasma TVs, the PDP-4270HD is their smallest and least expensive set. But don’t take this to mean that it’s a cheapo model. This is a Pioneer, a top plasma manufacturer. By no means is this short on features, build quality, or performance. It boasts the absolute lastest in Plasma display technology and manufacturing.

Features

The PDP-4270 sports a laundry list of great features and inputs, giving it extraordinary flexibility.

The list of inputs is fairly exhaustive:

* 2 HDMI with Audio Support
* 3 Component
* 4 Composite
* 2 S-Video
* Antenna A & B
* USB (Mass Storage Class) for connecting a digital camera
* PC Input

I'm sure there are people who own that much gear, but wow! That's a lot of inputs! Conveniently, about a third of them are located on the side of the unit for easy accessiblity. Outputs include analog & optical digital audio for output to your Dolby Digital Receiver. It even has a Subwoofer output so you don't even need a HT receiver to get the full audio spectrum.

It sports two tuners - one NTSC (analog) and one ATSC (digital off-the-air). There's also a cable card slot for those who have that service available to them.

Another interesting feature of this seventh generation plasma is a 1080P input, although it is not a 1080P capable display. It accepts a 1080P signal and downscales it to 720P. The idea here is that while the screen does not fully support 1080P, you will get some enhanced picture quality from 1080P sources. So when it comes time to upgrade to that next generation DVD player you will see some of the benefit of that 1080P output. At the same time, you're not paying the premium price tag of a 1080P display. It's also been argued that it can be difficult to even see the difference between 1080i and 1080p, but that's another discussion.
Viewing Impressions
To get started, I made some basic adjustments to set per AudioReview.com's resident HDTV guru, Edtyct. My sources were a Denon DVD-2200 DVD Player and my Comcast High Definition cable box. I connected them both to the television using component video cables.

With high-definition sources, the Pioneer was just plain gorgeous, and difficult to fault. The televisions only limitation was the signal feeding it. The better the signal, the more incredible the picture. With good high definition material, the picture seems to be nearly flawless.

With HD movies such as "Walk the Line", the picture was sharp, colors were rich and full, but at the same time, there was a a very pleasing subtlety to the overall presentation. It was real and filmlike, and in a way, calming. It didn't have that over the top brightness and vivid color that you might associate with a high definition plasma.
Moving on to sports was an entirely different, but still very pleasing experience. I watched a lot of football, both NFL and NCAA in the short two weeks I had with the unit. Color and detail were simply outstanding. A friend watching with me commented: "This looks better than real life!" and that seemed to sum up the Pioneer's performance.

With lower resolution sources like conventional DVD and standard definition TV, however, the Pioneer was mixed bag. It revealed the limits of the DVD format, something I hadn’t experienced on my smaller 30” Sony CRT HDTV. With the smaller screen of the 30” Sony, I was always quite happy and impressed with the performance of my Denon DVD-2200 DVD player, even compared with high definition movies available to me via my Comcast cable service. I had been very happy with this player, and I was excited to try it out with the Pioneer. Unfortunately, the results were not great. The Pioneer revealed in stark detail the limitations of the DVD format. Compared to HD, the picture was flat, dull and lifeless, even with a remastered “Superbit” and other good quality DVDs. Even my best-looking DVDs were exposed. I had previously believed that I was satisfied with today’s standard definition DVDs. The Pioneer left me thirsting for an HD disc player.

Performance with standard definition television was much better than my Sony CRT. A common - and valid - knock on high defintion televisions is that they are often terrible with standard def programming. HDTVs have trouble upscaling the very limited video data of standard definition programs to their higher resolution displays. The HDTV has to extrapolate and essentially “invent” data to fill the greatly increased screen resolution. The results are often less than stellar.

With all this in mind, I was expecting standard-def programming content to really stink, but I was in fact pleasantly surprised. It still wasn’t as good as a good standard definition analog set, but it looked quite good.

Issues

The Pioneer's performance was difficult to fault, especially with HD content, but I had a few issues.

Poorly laid out remote. The remote is extremely long, and the buttons are very awkwardly placed. For example, the volume and channel buttons were at the very bottom of the remote, meaning that you couldn’t hold the remote and change the volume and channel with the same hand. The great length of the remote would inevitably fall out of your hand. In addition, other key buttons were in odd places, and you had hold the remote in one hand, scan it for the button you were looking for, and press it with the other button. It seemed as though absolutely zero effort went into the ergonomics. I tend to use Comcast's 3-in1 remote for most vieiwing, so this isn't a huge issue. Just a bit frustrating considering the sophistication and cost of the unit.

Confusing Aspect ratio options. I found the different setting for setting the aspect ratio somewhat confusing. With my DVD player, the Pioneer seemed to default to a setting which stretched the screen vertically. The different options on the remote were somewhat confusing as well, with terms like “standard wide” “standard cinema” and “user wide”. I could never really tell which one was the unaltered signal, and no matter what setting I chose, it always seemed that I was watching a distorted picture of some kind.

Loud buzz. My biggest complaint about the set was a loud buzz emanating from the set almost all the time. The longer the set was on the, the worse it got. Trying to watch late at night at low volume was nearly impossible as the buzz from the set would over power the volume. This was the most damning flaw, and the only one that make me hesitant to purchase the set. True, my room is probably too small for the set and i was likely sitting too close.
Summing Up

In my limited time with this plasma, it was easy to see that it is an exquisite set and a very worthy centerpiece to a serious home theater system. Performance with high definition content is nothing short of astounding, and standard definition doesn't disappoint. It seemed to fall short with conventional DVD's, but my two year old DVD player (ancient by today's technology standards) and the limited resolution of the DVD itself must bear some of this blame. In terms of overall features and usability, it's a fully featured set that leaves little to complain about. The only issue that would cause me to hesitate from purchasing is a constant buzz, which was a bit overwhelming in my small room. All in all, it's a fantastic performer, and portends a very exciting future for high definition television.