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Earlier today, I had the chance to sit in on Pioneer’s KURO Booth Theater, where they showed their Extreme Contrast Concept extension to the KURO line.  If you’re not familiar with the KURO line, it is a very high rated line of Plasma TVs - which are essentially le creme de la creme in the industry today. 

Pioneer reps sat us in a pitch black room, told us to turn off our cellphones not to take pictures, and turned on 3 of their current line of KURO Plasma TVs.  The big thing they’re hyping this year is “Black is everything” and “Black like never before.”  Of course, their current line of KUROs (PDP-5010FD) had a pretty strong light source coming from the panel - which lit up the screen even when nothing was on it.  However when they turned on the new Extreme Contrast Concept, you could barely even see it sitting there since it was such a true-black image, or as Pioneer puts it, absolute black.  The video they were playing was a wide screen format, so there was a bar on top and bottom—which allowed us to compare the black levels in those regions.

The Extreme Contrast Concept TV was 50-inches in diagonal and contained “Non primary, self emissive technology.”  No release date or price is available at this time, but you can bet it’s going to be expensive, as the current top of the line is at Best Buy for $4,999.99.  More to come as the technology gets closer to the market.  For now, we’ll just have to put up with the terrible black levels in our current TVs.  Well done Pioneer… we’re looking forward to our review unit!

Note: The image above does not do the Extreme Contrast Concept justice since my flash lit up the screen of the TV.

Check out the gallery: Peep Show: Pioneer shows off Extreme Contrast Concept KURO at CES 2008