Pioneer PDP-428XD review

Pioneer PDP-428XD Review

Reviewed by: Ian Morris

Reviewed on: 28 September 2007

Performance
This TV certainly does live up to its promise on black levels. We looked at films like Serenity on HD DVD that require a strong black next to a well-lit subject and were amazed at how deep black space was. So if deep blacks are your thing, this TV won't disappoint.

We were also struck by how good the movie mode was on this TV. Watching Serenity, we noticed very fluid motion at the start, with very little film judder. The Pioneer manages to keep this smoothing to an appropriate level, so it doesn't generally feel unnatural.

The remote control continues the PDP-428XD's fabulous styling

We really liked the picture quality, although there were times when we thought the image looked a little soft of HD material. That said, the TV does ship with most of the picture enhancement settings turned on. This sounds good in theory but in practice, a good HD signal shouldn't need much image processing, so these settings can mess up the picture. As always, we'd recommend fiddling around until you get the picture to your taste.

One of the most impressive things we found with this television was the quality it managed to pull off regular DVDs. We used a Toshiba HD-E1, their low-end HD DVD player, set to output at 720p and stuck Blade II in the tray. Moments later, our jaws were on the floor.

We've very rarely seen such amazing picture quality from a high definition TV displaying a DVD. If you've got a large collection of movies on DVD, you'll be thrilled with what this TV can do. We tried a number of DVD players with HDMI out, and every time the TV produced a great picture.

We noticed that this screen has very little dot crawl, something that we often see on plasma screens. We could see some sparkling pixels but these were far less noticeable than other PDPs we've seen before.

Sound on the Pioneer is good. In fact, this TV has one of the best overall sounds we've heard from a flat panel in quite some time. There is enough bass to add punch to soundtracks when needed but dialogue is clear, too. We also like the dedicated subwoofer output. We hooked up a Jamo SUB 200, and loved the extra punch it gave us.

Conclusion
On the promise of deep blacks this TV delivers completely. We did think at times that definition of the picture wasn't as good as some other TVs we've seen recently. Some of the new 1080p LCDs, for example, and Samsung's 1080p 50-inch plasma do add more detail to the picture. 

Available online for around £1,600, you'll find cheaper screens which boast 1080p. New LED backlights on LCDs couple improve the situation in the near future but no screen can offer anywhere near the black level of this TV.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday