Pioneer PDP-435XDE review

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this panel's performance is its inability to produce dark-enough blacks. Black areas of the picture appeared dark gray rather than inky black, robbing the image of much impact, especially when viewed in a darkened home theater.

The panel's video processing is good, but juddering can be a problem across nearly all of the sources. We suspect that some of the internal processing, which is no doubt very clever, actually introduces more artefacts than the Standard setting. We compared the two during the difficult opening of Star Trek: Insurrection and saw more jagged lines and image instability when the Advanced options were engaged.

We looked at the Advanced setting with our DVD player set to interlaced mode, but Pioneer has unfortunately allowed the processing to be active even when the 435XDE is fed a progressive-scan signal, which results in even more artefacts. Since a lot of people will be using a progressive-scan DVD player anyway, this is a potentially serious design flaw that we hope Pioneer fixes in future models. Speaking of processing, we also preferred to leave the other picture settings, including noise reduction, DRE, and CTI, turned off for critical viewing.

After an ISF-style calibration, we spun up some of our favorite DVD movie titles. The opening scenes of Alien revealed muddy gray-looking blacks, along with a significant amount of visible low-level noise (it looked like roiling motes in the black areas). The opening scenes of Pirates of the Caribbean looked quite good, with awesome colour saturation, but even in these relatively bright scenes, there was some visible noise. Skin tones looked really natural, a benefit of accurate colour decoding and linear grayscale tracking.

Turning to high-def, Behind Enemy Lines from our American JVC HM-DH3000U D-VHS deck looked mostly excellent. Again colour saturation and skin tone rendition were exceptional. There was some visible noise though, even in brighter scenes with the HD content.

Edited by David Katzmaier
Additional editing by Guy Cocker