Pioneer Intros World's First 1080p Plasma

Pioneer announced yesterday that it has begun shipping a 1080p plasma, the world's first. Announced back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, the 50-inch Pioneer Elite PureVision PRO-FHD1 carries a steep MSRP of $10,000. According to the company, the challenge in creating a 50-inch plasma display with a 1080p signal was to reduce the pixel size by half in order to fit more than 2 million pixels in the screen.

Although there really isn't much in the way of true 1080p content available yet, both Blu-ray and HD DVD should get there in the second or third product generations. It will take substantially longer than that for the broadcasting, cable and satellite communities to convert to what some consider the "full" HD standard. However, there is some benefit to the 1080p upconverting that the high-end video scaler performs on lower-resolution content.

So here's a question: If for the same money you could buy a 60-inch 768p plasma or a 50-inch 1080p, which would you buy? Or if you could buy two or three 50-inch 768p plasmas for that same price (one each for the family room, living room and bedroom), would you? Then again, people who are spending $10K on a TV might not be all that concerned with value.