Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. And so as the extraordinary price erosion in the flat TV marketplace has made it difficult for even household brand names to compete, industry 'minnow' Pioneer has opted to focus its considerable PDP expertise on producing something so truly cutting-edge that it can maintain a premium price, even as lesser screens head to the bargain bins.

The result is Kuro, a plasma TV design so radical that in some ways it's scarcely plasma as we know it. The first wave of Kuro's have won acclaim worldwide, so what should we expect from this 60in model? As the first Full HD Kuro panel, the PDP-LX608D arrives in a flight-case heavy with expectation.

The crux of the matter

Lest you missed our evaluation of Pioneer's debut Kuro TV, the 508XD, the key thing you need to know is 'black'. Kuro is Japanese for black, the bezels of Kuro TVs are entirely black, and most important of all, proprietary Pioneer technologies produce levels of black that are deeper, more cinematic and more natural than any seen before on a flatscreen TV.

Pioneer has achieved these revolutionary black levels by cultivating four main areas of innovation: 1) there's an improved 'crystal emissive layer' that boosts the efficiency of the discharge cycle in each plasma chamber; 2) created unusually deep-set plasma chambers that reduce the potential for colour and light cross-contamination; 3) beefed up video processing to treat bright and dark scenes differently; and 4) refined the Deep Colour Filter to soaks up ambient light. Simple huh?

Love hertz

As befits what's unquestionably a premium TV, the LX608D is stuffed with top-flight video tech.

While other brand's have only just begun to offer support for 1080/24 HD video, Pioneer has long had a 72Hz mode. This is similarly optimised for the playback of 1080p/24Hz sources.

Other attractions include a 'dot by dot' mode that removes overscanning for perfect transposition of Blu-ray and HD DVD material to the TV's 1920 x 1080 panel, no less than four dedicated noise reduction routines (including one for reducing MPEG noise); and a USB input. The three HDMIs, meanwhile, are all v1.3 and CEC-enabled, meaning the TV's remote can operate any CEC-capable sources connected to them.