Thomas J. Norton

Pioneer has long been a leader in plasma display technology. Over the past few generations its sets have arguably produced some of the best images in the flat panel business. Whether or not the potential competition from the (apparently) now stillborn SED technology, which promised astonishingly deep blacks, gave Pioneer an added incentive to achieve new and previously unattainable depths in that important aspect of display design we can't know for certain. But what we can know for certain is that Pioneer has set a new standard its new KURO sets.

When Pioneer released its first KURO plasma sets last year, its eighth generation of plasmas overall, they met with nearly universal praise. Critics acclaimed the KURO series for the new standards it set with the depth of its blacks. Fittingly, the word “kuro” means deep, dark, and penetrating in Japanese.

Kuro is a Japanese word meaning deep, black, and penetrating. And on the tenth anniversary of its entry into the plasma display business, Pioneer announced the culmination of its <I>Project Kuro</I> to the assembled consumer electronics press in New York.

Come next Tuesday, two anxiously awaited titles will hit the video stores&mdash;<I>Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl</I> and <I>Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest</I>.