Gentlemen,

I agree that when you examine these things on paper, the higher number looks great. I would argue (having stood in front of them at work for 8 hours a day and then sat at home and watched one), is that increasing this particular figure is somewhat like increasing bhp in an automobile. At best it presents an oppurtunity to build a better performing machine, but without many other aspects in place it will have issues connecting its power to the road.

After seeing the Sony 11" OLED with its 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and realizing that its blacks were no deeper than one of our 2 year old floor model plasmas, my thoughts on the importance were truly crystalized on this matter. My BeoVision 4 D9 panel has the deepest blacks I've seen on any screen (Pioneer Kuro included), but renders detail with much greater precision to to its adaptive picture controls.

The thing that stand out for me on these black-idle, variable backlit, super contrast ratio screens, is that they seem to give everything a "comic book" look. By this I mean that things are over-sharpened yet still contain plenty of visual noise, the colors are unbalanced, and the blacks are not objectively deep. What I notice specifically about the blacks are that everything below a certain luminance value is simply flat black. This, of course, is not accurately rendered regardless of how deep that color fill might be. If I were wearing a tuxedo (meaning it was after 6pm any given day of the week) and I were to be shown on a screen of any make with all its figures maxed out versus a B&O panel with whatever its stats happen to be, you wouldn't be able to see the stripe down the side of the trousers, nor most of the lapel, nor the subtle folds and creases in the fabric. I'd simply look black. If speakers played sound the way that these televisions showed pictures, we wouldn't even be debating this.

TripEnglish:

There is a great deal of depth to this post. What you refer to in the last paragraph is 'black crush' in an effort to improve black. one loses the detail

 It is very relevant that you have chosen the D9 screen to compare quality and black levels- the D9HD screen scores highly in this area, which was later lost on the 1080 screen panasonic came out with later and that screen is fitted to the latest BV4....

If B&O want to maintain the pricing- they should offer the very latest panel varients at all times- this goes for |LCD as well. Otherwise the buyers will leave in considerable numbers because the picture quality addvantage just isnt there with BnO-

I don't want to seem a bomb-thrower here 355; but these two sentences from your last post seem to stand in stark opposition to one another.  Similarly in other threads we have discussed the difference between 'latest' and 'best'.  I think B&O are to be lauded to the extent that they resist the constant pressure to jump to the latest technological advance when it does not in fact improve overall quality, and in some cases actually decreases it. 

Russ