Conclusion
If you've read through all the reviews on this website, you'll discover that every single HDTV which has been awarded "Highly Recommended"... or better... delivers excellent black level. Inky blacks enhance the realism of dark scenes, bolster image depth, and lend richness to colours. All things being equal, it is truly a straightforward case of "May the HDTV with the best blacks win".
And it is in this aspect that the Pioneer PDP-LX5090 stands peerless. Sure, the Samsung F96 LCD TV can produce 0 cd/m2 true blacks by switching off its local-dimming LED backlight, but only when there's little to no content on screen. During normal viewing, the blacks on the Samsung F96 LCD looked noticeably greyer compared to the Pioneer PDP-LX5090 Kuro right beside it. Although the improvement in black level going from an 8G (which is already miles ahead of other flat screen televisions on the market) to 9G (PDP-LX5090) Pioneer plasma is perhaps not as dramatic as the significant leap from a 7G (the generation prior to Kuro) to 8G (the first generation of Kuro), it is still visible nonetheless... certainly more than subtle in a dimly-lit viewing environment.
It's not as if the Pioneer PDP-LX5090 performed poorly in other areas. In fact, it aced pretty much every criterion of picture quality we could think up: D65 greyscale, 2.2 gamma, accurate chromaticities, spot-on colour decoding, excellent video processing, fine detail resolution, high motion resolution, and wide viewing angles. Even taking into account a couple of niggles, we firmly believe you cannot find another consumer flat screen television that can come close to matching the image quality delivered by 9G Pioneer Kuro plasmas. No surprise here then: the Pioneer PDP-LX5090 directly replaces its predecessor the PDP-LX508D as the best flat panel HDTV we've tested to date.
