The best picture on a HDTV. Modes for any signal (except progressive).

Cost a lot (unless you get a great deal)

I must be one of the luckiest people alive. I have been looking for a HDTV for a while and really love Pioneer equipment. I didn't have the 8300 to just pluck down on a TV. Ultimate was closing out discontinued items that were left in there store and wala, I end up getting this thing. As one other person said, God is good. ;-) This has got to be the best HDTV that I have ever looked at. I was going to buy a Mitsubishi series HDTV and probably only a 50'. This is a huge TV, but it has a very good picture. I was not impressed with the way it looked in the store at all. It seemed dark and not as detailed as other TV’s. When I got it home there was a really big difference in how it looks. The whole picture is crisp and detailed. The picture was even better than our older Sony Trinitron TV. I have it hooked up to a pioneer elite DVD player and it looks amazing. Progressive scan really does make a difference. Yeah the TV probably looks good with a regular DVD player but why would you pay for the TV and not have the best possible signal? I don't understand that logic at all. I have watched movies all weekend long and can't keep my eyes off of the TV. The picture looks excellent from top corner to the center. It’s also nice to be able to stretch you images from any signal. When watching TV this is a great feature. It doesn't really bother me to be stuck in full mode on progressive, because you can just use interlaced and change modes just fine.

Similar Products Used:

None

After ISF calibration there is no way on earth anyone could ever find fault with this gorgeous picture!!!

Crooked convergence lines make for a slightly slanted screen. NO DVI INPUTS!!! I may be left out in the cold with high def.

I'm not going to bore you with describing how great the picture is, if you have looked at this TV you know it's superb. I do have a few points I would like to make though. ISF CALIBRATION! Get it done! For those not familiar with this it stands for IMAGING SCIENCE FOUNDATION (www.imagingscience.com) and it is a must! If you don't get it done you're only seeing 75% of your TV's potential. Don't waist extra money on some guy from the local TV store to come and tinker with your set for 20 minutes just tweaking the factory presets - make sure he is ISF trained. I spent $225 and the guy worked for 2 hours on mine. This is basically what he did. First he took the bottom grille cover off the front of the set and removed the piece of wood that is there to expose the spaghetti of wires inside. Then he hooks up a laptop computer to it and measures how your 3 guns are firing. My red gun was shooting way too high. So he evens the guns out so they are all firing the same - THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!! He then puts in his own dvd and gets a big white square to come up on the screen. He then puts a suction cup on the screen and this measures how bright your picture should be, not too dark or too bright. Then he hooks up a $10,000 Philips color analyzer to make sure all the colors are acurate. The greens are green, not yellowy-green etc. He then ajusts the convergence for you. This is done for every input source you have be it satellite, dvd, vcr, or whatever. I'm telling you it makes a huge difference. C'mon folks you spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on the set - spend a few hundred more and get it PROPERLY calibrated - ISF! Remember... tweaking the picture presets is useless unless your guns are all firing evenly first. It will also add life to your guns - my red gun was firing waaayyyy too hot. DVI CONNECTIONS!! (Digital Visual Interface) A TRUE digital connection. I am extremely mad that I spent all this money on an excellent TV, and I may not be able to watch ANY high def TV in the future. They want to make it so ALL high def shows come through this connection only(or firewire). The Pro 710 has no DVI input but the 730HD has 2! If they make it so that all high def material can only be accessed through a DVI input the 710HD will still be able to view the channels, but they will be down-converted to 480P instead of the 1080i. That is no good!!! I have found one problem with my set. When I bring up the 72 point convergence screen I noticed that my white lines running horizontally are a bit crooked. They slant down on one side by half an inch, therefore I am looking at a slightly slanted picture. I have had a Pioneer technician look at it and he did go into some menu only he could access to straighten out the lines. The problem was that any line he manually moved affected all the other lines so now the original line is corrected but now others that were fine before are now slanted. I'm having him come out and work on it again but the Pioneer people are very slow to accomodate you. One word of advice concerning progressive scan dvd players. I spoke to my Pioneer guy and he told me not to waist my money on a $250 Toshiba progressive scan unit as it will have no benefits over the line doubling system in the PRO710. He told me the only way to get a slightly improved picture is to buy a decent, more expensive unit like the Pioneer Elite DV-47Ai for around $1200 US.

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panasonic 27 inch TV

Build quality, picture, cabinetry

None

Outstanding television! Clear and deep picture. DVD movies, particularly with a progressive scan DVD player, are wonderful to watch. Cabinetry is a definite plus - gives a feeling of luxury (no cheap plastic casing here). Distance from the screen is critical. You cannot be too far away (withing reason), but if you are less than 10 feet away, the clarity suffers a bit (same as if you viewed ANY television too close). At 10-15 feet away, I believe there is no better rear projection TV on the market. Period. The new DLP systems are phenomenal, but for the money, the value and quality of the Pioneer Elite are unparalleled. If you cannot see $5000 difference in picture, why pay it? Shop carefully, there are good deals out there.

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None

Detail, saturation, color accuracy, very low distortion, accurate black level, very good line doubler, more inputs than you could need.

None really

I looked at every HDTV on the market and this one was the best RPTV I could find. I had it for about 3 months and decided to upgrade to component inputs...WOW, big difference. I then waited another couple of months before I decided to have an ISF certified technician calibrate the set...another WOW, huge improvement in too many ways to discuss here. If you own this TV, you spent some bucks, don''t be a dork, spend the money to have it professionally calibrated by an ISF technician. You will finally be getting your $$$''s worth. I wasn''t to comfortable dropping that much cash on a TV but now that I''ve got it set up properly, it is just an awesome television.

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At the time this tv came out, there were no similar products. It was way ahead of the competition.

Magnificent picture, exterior appearance, progessive component inputs.

Remote control, lack of input labeling,#of inputs could be greater, progressive input locks the screen in FULL mode.

I agree with the previous reviews in most cases, but I am more critical. I have spent the past two years searching for an HD ready set that is really the best. This is an expensive purchase and likely to be kept for a number of years, so you should be pleased with the purchase and have no regrets.

I compared sets all over several Eastern cities, and at several Hi-Fi shows. Clearly to me the Pioneer sets and the Mitsubishi were in the top ranks, with surprisingly, the 64 inch Sharp right up there. Later I found out from a dealer that the Sharp/Pioneer are twins and these companies share their technology and build various parts for each other, so my eyes did not deceive me. The Mitsubishi was eliminated from the running because the line doubling creates artifacts, i.e. shimmering, picture noise, and some other things. It's quite good, but no cigar. The Sharp is a bargain, in that it's cheaper, but that was in comparison to the Pioneer 700. So I waited for the 710. They put the 510 and 610 in the stores first and they are stunning. I was told to wait and that the 710 would be just as good, only with the 64 inch screen. You can purchase this set on the net for $6500 plus shipping or in New York for the same pricing. I opted for a local dealer who came down to $7300 with shipping which while not small change is worth it for this set.

NTSC over the air broadcasts blown up this big range from awful to acceptable, depends on your antenna and location and the signal being ghost free. DSS can look stunning on the pay per view and HBO, Showtime, and other premium channels, but not much better than cable on the others, but this is the fault of DSS giving enough "bits" to some channels and less to others. They should wakeup and provide fewer channels and better quality. The line doubler in the Pioneer is the best I have seen (bar Farouja et al). This set also has 3:2 pull down for films and can make the picture even better. Pioneer calls this Pure Cinema and it is a real plus previously only available in separate boxes costing thousands of dollars.

With DVD the picture is just stunning. When friends see it their jaws drop. There has never been a picture like this possible up to now in your living room unless you spent really big bucks on a front projector and screen.

Using the Progressive DVD from my Panasonic H1000D, the picture IMPROVES. Run out of words to describe this picture. Downside (there always is one) is that the Pioneer locks into Full Screen Mode and you have no size adjustments available. So the picture may fill the screen, or have black bars at top and bottom in varying degrees depending on how the original film was framed. This is not a major problem considering the increased depth, dimentionality (approaches 3-D), increased color saturation, and naturalness of skin tones that come with the progressive picture. Since the Panasonic 1000 has all outputs available simultaneously, you can hook up the regular component outputs to input number 2, and then use the Mode selector for sizing. This fills the screen with a step down in picture quality, but this non progressive picture is still better than any other HD set.

There are three sets of inputs on the back, and one set on the front. Only two of these are component (back only), and the third set is composite/S-video only, and you lose these inputs if you hook up RGB input (a switch changes input 3 to either/or on the back. So I think one more complete set on the back would be appreciated. This depends on how large your equipment count is. This is somewhat compensated for by something I have not seen before, and is buried in the fine print of the manual. The inputs all seek out a live signal. This means you can hook up component (DVD), composite (VHS), S-video (DSS) to input ONE alone, and whatever you have turned ON, the signal will be selected by the Pioneer TV without changing inputs on the TV. Great feature.

You can turn on/off the video noise reduction and set it to five different levels. You can turn on/off the Y-C correction on the composite inputs and adjust it to five levels. You can turn on/off the scan velocity modulation (SVM) and adjust it to two levels. Flesh Tone can be turned off, for your own more precise choices of color and tint.

There are five color temperature choices.

Out of the box, the convergence is very good, as is the geometry of the picture. Horizontal and vertical lines are perectly straight (extremely rare), this was impossible to achieve on my previous Sony Wega. With the manual convergence screen you can adjust over 70 points on the screen in both red and blue, and this is held in memory for each screen mode. So you can adjust your way to a perfect picture in Full, Cinema Wide, Natural Wide, Zoom and 4:3 Standard. This last mode has light gray bars on the sides, to help prevent phosphor burn in, but I find it somewhat annoying. Since you would seldom use this (the stretching is quite good for standard screen size material) using the other modes.

There is also a screen position feature available in two modes, Cinema Wide and Zoom. This lets you move the picture up or down to catch words at the top or bottom of the screen that possibly are cut off.

The remote has a great many buttons, and it is illuminated, BUT the buttons that move left/right/up/down/select are too close together and you can press the wrong one or two at a time. Since these are used over and over with DVD and with the menu system, it can become a bother. Inputs have their own buttons (good) so you don't have to cycle through all the inputs with one button. But unlike other sets, you can't name the inputs (DVD,VHS, etc.) Minor flaw. The remote can control other non Pioneer equipment.

Last complaint: There are three modes of presets - color, tint, contrast, brightness already chosen inside the set. When you choose one and alter the settings they are kept in what is called "user mode" and memorized for that input. Each input has it's own memory. But it would be better to have some more memory so each one of these modes could be altered and kept in memory (Sony does this).

The menu system is simply great because instead of a dozens of small lines (Sony, Mitsubishi) numbers from -30 through zero to +30 allow you write down the settings to easily return to the ones you made with test discs as absolutely correct (Video Essentials or Avia test DVD). It is always necessary to make some adjustments away from tests based on the material you are watching, most sources are not made to standards.

Finally, I have obtained the repair manual and you can (very carefully) changed the internal preset adjustments with the service menu. Absolutely essential to write down every number on these screens, so you can get back if you screw up. This allows you to set the perfect settings at what appear to be zero on the menus. This set is so good, and the picture is so wonderful, I have not felt the need to have it professionally adjusted. According to the Avia test disc the gray scale is very good except at the two lowest levels, and the tint is considerably off at the zero position, but this is within the limits of what you can do with the menu items.

You may never leave home to see a film again with this set and DVD's. And the cabinet is beautiful, yet non obtrusive. Zeniths and Sony's look gigantic by comparison in the same screen size. Zenith upconverts any signal to 1080i and creates artifacts, Sony Digital Reality Creation softens the picture, so they eliminated themselves from the running.

Get one if you can afford it. I have not had a purchase please me so much in a long, long time. The Fifth Element, Goldeneye, and many more, take your breath away. The other night I watched Meet Joe Black (remake of Death Takes a Holiday) and you could see the dust motes in the air floating around Anthony Hopkins! If the production is cheap (movies made for TV) you can see the makeup, nothing can hide from the resolution of this set. I have ordered an RCA 100 HD receiver to see if it works with the Pioneer (it has some technical reasons to work best with RCA TV sets)and will send in an update on over the air HDTV which is available here in limited quantities. The Pioneer HD receiver is very expensive and no one can demonstate it that I have found.

P.S. A dear friend who depends on my technical advice thought this set was too expensive and purchase the Mitsubishi 4:3 60 inch set. He is very disappointed and has spent 3/4 of the cost of the Pioneer for this disappointing picture. Beware.

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Sony 36 XBR 200, Mitsubishi HD 60inch 4:3

Awesome picture, when it works. Good remote. Beautiful cabinet

Never ending problems with red gun; Pioneer electronics lack
of concern for customer complaints

Got this unit early this year. Awesome picture and decent sound. About five weeks after receiving the unit everything on the screen turned red. Authorized Service center replaced red card and all was well for a few days. Then red flickering began. After two more visits and replacement of VR block, unit still doesn't work well. Watching any program is like having red tinted glasses on.

Pioneer customer service was not responsive to what is obviously a lemon. Their attitude is basically "its under warranty". Very disappointing. After spending 6G on a set you would think that Pioneer would show some initiative and replace the unit. It has only worked well for 5 weeks!

Now its going to the service center shop for a whole week. Oh well, I guess its back to my old 20" Sony for a while!

This is a Elite 720HD review...Picture sharpness, color, build quality, features, sound (yes sound).

none

I have had my 720HD for about 2 weeks now and am THRILLED!
I have seen and read about every big screen out there and NONE compare to this 720HD...even the ones with the 9" guns
(Zenith, Philips etc). Even my wife who would regularily care less about Audio/video equipment sat in wonder as she watched Schrek. I cannot imagine the picture getting any better...I even fear having it calibrated by an ISF guy because he/she may degrade the picture I already enjoy.
I have never seen such beautiful color in all my life on any type of screen and that includes in movie theaters. Final Fantasy looks far better than when I saw it at the theaters...hell every movie looks better on the 720HD. NO other HDTV can compare either when it comes to build quility. This is a gorgeous piece of furniture. Another huge surprise was the sound. I was expecting cheap audio quality because most folks hook it up to a theatre system right away...you do not have to, it sounds great right out of the box. This is good because I cannot afford my sound gear any time soon. Please view this set before you decide to buy anything else...You will not be sorry.

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none

Picture quality, physical appearance, technical versatility

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

I found a retailer on the net that I bought the Elite PRO-710HD for $6499 plus $175 shipping. I first saw the Pro-700HD a year or so ago and fell in love with that, but couldn't afford it. Since then the PRO-710HD has come out and replaced it. Let me tell you: the Lord moves in mysterious ways. I now believe it was his wisdom that caused me to have to wait, and now I have the PRO-710HD, and I am in TV heaven. There is no other explanation.

I plan on having it calibrated, and getting a line conditioner for the power, but haven't done either yet. The picture on this thing - straight out of the box - looked crisper than my Mitsubishi 36 inch - and I have always been impressed with the outstanding picture on my 36 inch Mit. My wife's comments were, "Wow! It really looks good even when standing over here (she was at about a 120 degree angle off to the left).

I could list many superlatives to describe this television, but I don't have all day to type all of them. Component video from my DVD showed a picture that could only be described as "real life". You could see all of the moles on Hugh Grants face!!! (wife wanted to see Notting Hill on it).
And all of this BEFORE it has been calibrated!!!

I have always known that my dream TV was this tv. There simply is no comparison anywhere. I have been looking at TV's at almost every electronics place we went. Since we've got this, if my wife and I happen into an a place that sells big screens, we just look at them, shake our heads and smile - cause none of them even come close.

If you have the money, this is the best TV money can buy.

Except maybe a plasma TV, and I am not sure about that!!!

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Demo'd several big screen TV's

Everything

NONE.

This Set is simply -- Awesome. It even looks good turned off! DVD material is the best I have seen during my audition stage and now that I've had it I can't see myself upgrading for a long,long time. It is well worth the premium price that I paid at a local dealer.

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Mits 65905, Tosh TW65x--

The line doubler for NTSC video blows the competition away.Connectivity is super having component and RGB. Do not need progressive scan DVD player.Picture is gorgeous even with factory settings.With calibration HD picture is stunning.I have hooked it up with a Panasonic Digital VCR and DST50 STB HD decoder. Anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new TU-HDS20 Panasonic HD receiver. Black laquer finish is stately.DVD never looked this good. It is awesome.

Everyone speaks of the remote. I do not find it cumbersome. It is backlit too.

Even if the video is outstanding out of the box, please get a professional calibration done. You will see the difference. The audio is good but I have hooked it to my DENON 4800 and so it does not matter. It is pricey but you get what you pay for. I am extremely pleased with the product.Being a lifelong Sony guy I was apprehensive. But I think after comparing it with other similar products, it simply crushes the competition.

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None. My last TV was or still is (the kids gleefully took it)the SONY 53 XBR (5 years and still a great product)