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there's more to it than that

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr on March 4, 2008 at 06:37:45:
Pioneer has spent mucho $ in developing their plasma line, but they have had to charge a premium price to recoup those costs. Remember that the same thing happened to Fujitsu several years ago, though their situation was a bit different: they co-manufactured panels with Hitachi and out-sourced other panels from Matsushita for years because they had the best panels at the time. Fujitsu had the best electronics -- they still do, the AVM series of processors -- in the plasma market and, at the time, sourced the best panels in which to put their electronics (Matsushita). Pioneer's concentration has been on the high-end side of things, but as you can see from Fujitsu's announcement in December, it's just not profitable enough.

If anyone wants an "all" Pioneer model, the one to get will be the models coming out next -- Gen 9. These will be the best plasmas that Pioneer will produce that are solely their own. That said, Pioneer can only claim the top spot for plasmas with the introduction of their Kuro models (Gen 8). The model year right before that (Gen 7), they could only claim parity in black levels and color accuracy with Matsushita and Matsushita-sourced panels from Fujitsu. For many years before that, beginning with its acqusition of Plasmaco and their patents in plasma display technology in 1996, Matsushita has been the leader in this market on nearly every level (consumer market share, supplier to other manufacturers, supplier to the broadcast industry, quality:price ratio, black levels, color accuracy, etc). And in the pre-Kuro black level years, if you really wanted the better setup (panel and electronics), you could get a Panasonic plasma and a DVDO or Lumagen video processor for less than a Pioneer Elite model.

But if you know what's going on in plasma technology, you know that the Gen 9 models won't be Pioneer's best models. Pioneer, Matsushita (Panasonic) and Hitachi have collaborated on 10-lumen tech development and the plasmas that are produced from this joint venture will be nearly identical except for some (not all) of the electronics. Those ECC (Extreme Contrast Concept) models that were shown by Pioneer at CES are only about 6 - 9 months ahead of what the other two are capable of producing. Expect plenty of technology sharing between Matsushita and Pioneer before mid-2009. Both companies will benefit from this business decision and the end result will be better for the consumer on several levels.