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    Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

    A deepening cash crisis at Pioneer has forced the Japanese electronics group to close down what was once the world's leading flat-screen television business and cut 10,000 jobs from its workforce. full article
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    #2
    Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

    damn! that _really_ doesn't sound good for pioneer :S

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

      it shows what the market is like. Pioneer makes very expensive tvs. If i check my local shop the cheapest offered is the Pioneer Kuro KRL-32V 32" tft at 1500 euro. On the basis of my dvd player i guess they must use quality capacitors etc so this adds cost for them. Their tvs are supposed to be excellent.

      Meanwhile the majority of companies fight it out at the bottom and mid of the market. There is so many different brands and different products. Part of the different products on offer is cos every company has unnecessarily big range as a result of competition between products. ie samsung has this product coming in at 500 euro lets make one with relatively the same specs for 500 euro.

      Consumers cannot figure out the differences between models and have lost brand loyalty as everything is crap. Everything is crap because everything has to be cheap. This is not just because people dont have much money but also because they love to buy cheap crap.

      So in this market there is probably no place for pioneer.
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      Comment


        #4
        Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

        it shows 2 things:
        1-pioneer was expensive
        2-plasma market is much smaller than lcd anyway

        i predicted this(pioneer downfall) long time ago...guess the crisis didn't help much either...

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

          Pioneer, meh. Performance? No. Badly on SD scaling/upconversion on their TVs even with all the awesome blacks on black saga i kept hearing about for picture quality it is on par with competitions, same with Sony on this analog quality. Samsung is holding the golden cup for deep blacks this with LED DLP currently and we can get DLP, LCD or plamsa stuff fixed in few days usually and back at customer's. And Samsung is catching up on the SD scaling/conversions yearly. The current crop of 6 and 7 series Samsungs are darned good but give it 1 or 2 more years then I can deem it good on SD via analog as my CRT TV.

          Pioneer:
          Service, what service? That's barely called service. Awesomely snail pace and lot of fighting to get something done. Point in case we had one plasma unit that we could fix in a day with new YSUS driver IC or kit of YSUS system and logic board but no, pioneer had us ship it back (this is 50"), whole thing it sat for a year, then repair took place in a month or two, then we finally put it back at customer's. And it is not warranty and it is customer's expense to tune of about a thousand.

          Before anyone cut in that pioneer is good, I HAVE visited demo rooms at few high end AV stores (all private owned stores) so I have good handle on the range of many brands and models.

          Cheers, Wizard
          Last edited by Wizard; 02-14-2009, 05:59 PM.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

            10 minute edit again ugh: Continued:

            And makers need to be really careful with dot crawl issues and other vital things that will screw up the processing badly, so need to have good 3D comb circuit and other processing. Many are leaving this out again.

            I can recall very clearly in 1980s the quality were so good for a 575 line system with cooking, sporting, soap operas, doctor who episodes etc. Now this Marta S. and other similar shows and all this is so fuzzy makes me say huh? Is this producer fuzzing this shows on purpose?

            And yes right through quality CRT TVs if you throught was viewed through LCD/DLP/Plasmas.

            Cheers, Wizard

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

              >The current crop of 6 and 7 series Samsungs are darned good but give it 1 or 2 more years then I can deem it good on SD via analog as my CRT TV.

              but will they be interested in improving sd at all?
              i mean who's gonna ask for it?
              casual(and usual) user can't see a damn thing...

              best thing would be to buy few more crts while possible...i don't think i can trust tv mfrs will think about sd quality at all.
              ie they will, as much as they did so far...almost not at all.

              i agree there, pioneer was too expensive for no good reason. now they're gone.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                SD will be around for long time on old stuff as people still have tapes, older dvd players with SD only output and other things like older game consoles, plus, we are not supposed to switch over to HD till 2011 in canada. Keep in that mind as well.

                Plus, even via HDMI or component, you can have SD (480 on some channels) via the HD distribution or by antenna even signal is digital.

                i4004, this is not all "rosy" in your eyes. This is reality.

                Cheers, Wizard

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                  for us with tons of recorded sd content things indeed are not rosy...heh

                  what i said is that if you and i object sd quality on today's flat panels, they won't do anything because of us 2...

                  and when was the least time you heard some customer of yours bitch at "sd quality on falt panels"?

                  most people just don't see the differences we see...for them youtube style quality on their new panel(when they watch sd on it) is perfectly fine...
                  this is why i said getting few crts while they're still available would be good...though they take a lot of space...

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                    IMO Pioneer has the best SD quality of all flat panes out there, I did not buy one because they are too expensive tho
                    Second down the list is Panasonic, IMO great prices and very good SD quality
                    I bought a Panasonic PX80 37" Plasma, I only went with 37" to get better quality on SD material, several of my friends have commented on how good SD looks on it

                    I first bought a Sony LCD, was so disappointed in it that I was going to return it, everything looked like shit
                    But then after two days I found a Swedish forum which helped me realize how to set it up, after changing pretty much everything on the TV it now too looks great... (On SD)
                    My parents bought it off me, that one was a Sony KDL-40D3550

                    Thing is the shit you see in stores has so overblown settings to combat the crappy lighting they have there, so that is what many TV's are setup to display an ok picture for... (Think Media Markt etc)
                    "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                      it seems a lot has to do with the way you connect it: it seems scart rgb does worse than s-video or component....or hdmi...
                      how's your plasma connected to sd source?

                      i wacthed recently panasonic plasma 42pv80p and on sd it looked like crap.
                      ghosting, blure...any artefact you can think of....

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                        is this
                        http://www.panasonic.co.uk/html/en_G...trackInfo=true
                        the model you have?

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                          Yea, that's the model I have, tho with an E on the end for European market I think

                          My Plasma is connected via SCART to a Dreambox 7000S
                          A friend to me has a Panasonic TH-42PZ80E connected to his Dreambox 5620
                          For SD material mine looks a little less grainy, since I only have to upscale the picture to 37" vs his 42"

                          However for Bluray movies his is a bit better with the blacks but other than that not much difference IMO
                          "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                            >My Plasma is connected via SCART to a Dreambox 7000S

                            and is the scart mode cvbs, rgb, s-video or ypbpr?
                            (menu->setup->system settings->a/v settings....at least on dm500)
                            and does changing mode change image quality?

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                              RGB works best (the signal gets correctly identified by the monitor)
                              CVBS works too (But the monitor does not say "CVBS" when I select it)
                              The image quality looks to me exactly the same between the two, perhaps a very teeny teeny bit less grainy with RGB but it could be my imagination

                              s-video and ypbpr does not work, s-video becomes some scrolling B/W and ypbpr becomes just green scrolling shit, why you ask?
                              "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

                              Comment


                                #16
                                Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                                because we had some discussions on local satv forum.
                                i was of opinion that tvs make problems, not the sat. receivers.
                                nice to see i was right...

                                in essence it boils down to manufacturer and model of tv how will the scart feed look like...

                                on that forum somebody linked this thread, which is from another forum
                                http://www.hdtehnika.com/phpBB/viewt...68b27ce63#p262
                                where one tv is hooked(to dvd player) via hdmi, and another via scart...
                                but it's not the same tv-set in both cases(one is philips, another sony) so that in itself makes that test irrelevant...

                                when it comes to sd, good test is to compare flat panel to crt...flat will rarely come close to crt, let alone beat it...
                                flat panel that's close to crt is a good panel...

                                Comment


                                  #17
                                  Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                                  S-video and ypbpr needs to set the source box to output correct type as s-video is not 1080. 480 probably. The ypbpr may have capablity of 1080 disabled in the TV itself or the source due to HDCP.

                                  Cheers, Wizard

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                                    10 minute edit again. sigh:

                                    S-video and ypbpr needs to set the source box to output correct type as s-video is not 1080. 480 probably. The ypbpr may have capablity of 1080 disabled in the TV itself or the source due to HDCP.

                                    Panel is a LCD or plasma and I don't like this because this is very narrow defination. What I prefer to say is the mainboard that does the processing on the video itself is biggest determiner of SD quality. The color, gamma and all the adjustments helps but this doesn't alter the baseline processing.

                                    When I visit demos even they were adjusted properly, in SD they still look like high quality youtube which is easily done with a 500 bucks PC and I don't want this. I simply wanted simplicty of using a TV and players, receivers. Right now TV is almost there but I'm still waiting.

                                    The hardest test is noisy analog sources and still is with noisy picture transmitted over digital interfaces. Film aren't cleanest due to grain in film and other "defects", and low quality picture, many broadcasters/sources do this on purpose with any videos not just films or by error or squeezing more channels where they should not be, When this situation occurs the processor on the mainboard tend to distort this instead of handling it and display it as is on the screen due to not enough processing power to handle this or TV maker put in weak processor or lousy design of a processor.

                                    And I find this hard to watch this way, in mid 1990's, early on broadcaster started dabbling in digital processing and broadcast it in analog and sometimes got so much that image is utterly bad: red and blue get lines, color bandings etc.

                                    Cheers, Wizard

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                                      I did some read up on CVBS vs RGB vs YPbPr
                                      It apparently goes like this;

                                      CVBS
                                      RGB
                                      YPbPr

                                      As far as quality is concerned, the Dreamboxes can support YPbPr through the SCART connector with a cable like the attached picture, I have ordered one and will report any change in quality I see...
                                      Be warned that a purple line can be seen if you are unlucky and have a box with this problem, many boxes seem to be affected;
                                      http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/bo...threadid=11078
                                      Attached Files
                                      "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Re: Pioneer exits flat-screen TV production market

                                        wizard, yes, i usually tell people best test for flat panel is to hook it to vhs...hehe..
                                        yes, processing, but knowing how much processing it takes to do it well...huh...may take few more years than you anticipate...
                                        or, like i say, it may never happen if nobody payes attention to sd scaling and deinterlacing portions of the algorithm...

                                        per, thanks, good call...although i don't have a flat panel at all(for the reasons i mentioned above and in this post) i would like to establish few facts.
                                        do you have a device with both hdmi and scart output to check if hdmi does better than scart?

                                        the full list (from worst to best) is like this:

                                        composite (cvbs..it means color-video(luma)-blanking-syncro...it's what analog signal is made of)

                                        s-video (simillar to above, but luma and chroma(color) are separated so you don't have crosstalk artefacts...these are easy to see(on composite) if osd menus have particular color etc.)

                                        rgb (all thre channels completely separated...) and ypbpr(these are channels that correspond to actual tv system used better than rgb, ie signal internall works with these components, then ends up with rgb to send to tube..or whatever...heh)

                                        rgb should be better than ypbpr(it is a better system) but there's an issue of how do you convert ypbpr to rgb...do it badly and resulting rgb may as well look worse than ypbpr it's derived from....

                                        rgb is essentially like analog vga pc-monitor link...red green and blue completely seprate...
                                        ypbpr has luma and 2 chroma components, ie things you need to get full rgb signal(you send only 2 components(and luma) because from these 2 and luma you can figure out all 3 colors...this was done in time of analog tv to save bandwidth...)
                                        because we can view ypbpr as "compressed"(to at least some extent..as conversion will always be somewhat lossy), rgb is superior type.

                                        Comment

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