Confirmed: Panasonic and Pioneer Teaming Up for Plasma Panels

When Pioneer announced it was going to stop making its own plasma panels and outsource them to another company, informed speculation was that they were buddying up with Panasonic. A press conference earlier today confirmed that’s the case, and Kuro will use the same Neo PDP panels that are going into Panasonic’s Viera plasma sets.

Like Pioneer told us before, while they’re sharing some tech secrets and even swapping engineers to develop better plasmas for the future, the processing part of the Kuro magic will stay in Pioneer’s hands. But, despite lower production costs, don’t expect cheaper Kuros for a while—the move’s to make Pioneer more profitable. We’ll start seeing the co-developed sets in Fall 2009. [Impress]