Slashdot Mirror
Plasma TVs for Video Games?
moonboy asks: "As plasma televisions continue to come down in price (Gateway even has a 42" available for $2999) I'm considering purchasing one. Has anyone here had any experience with these and particularly playing games on them? I'm thinking about both console and PC games however, I'm concerned about refresh and resolution. How do they compare?"
I have played Quake III on an 8000 dollar Philips Plasma 60" (I think it was 60", might have been 56"). It rocked to no end, whether I would shell out the money for something like that though is another question entirely (personally my 21 inch Viewsonic is enough for games? Guess it was personal preferance though.
does this occur as badly on plasma displays? what are the fundemental differences between LCD and plasma? they seem awfully similar from the outside... although one would suspect the plasma display to run more hot.
moox. for a new generation.
It shouldn't, most plasmas are progressive scan and 1080i- hence they should refresh every pixel VERY quickly. Progressive Scan means that the entire screen is redrawn in a certain time interval not just the pixels that change. 1080i is just a form of HDTV.
Insert obligatory Doom III reference here..
852 x 480 resolution isn't going to look that good I'd rather have 1280x1024 or higher on a 21" screen it will work just don't expect the detail of a modern computer monitor. 42 inches equals some pretty big pixels, it sounds like a good TV, not good enough for HDTV and not good enough for a computer monitor. If you're mainly interested in a TV its great elsewise look else where.
Plasma displays will burn in, so if you have a video game with a part that doesn't change (score box or whatever) it will always be lightly visable, in negative, on whatever you do. It may even change the color so it's visable when the display is off.
I don't know of any TVs that support 1080p, which is what your describing. (Not that they don't exist.)
Usually 720p is the highest progressive scan available.
There's a fairly good description of progressive vs. interlaced at Panasonic, but it concentrates on 480p vs. 480i. (The basic idea is the same though.)
I'm looking for a HEPA media filter for my TV. I'm alergic to reality shows.
Plasma displays are completely different from LCD's. They change color quickly, even quicker than CRT's, so in this respect they might even be better.
I have heard a couple rumors that I've not been able to substantiate, and would appreciate feedback from someone with experience with these displays. One is that the display has a useful life of only a few years (my source was not able to say what happens then). The other is that they grow fuzzy after 2 - 3 years. Now I would consider (just consider!) planning for one of these, but for multi kilobucks I would expect it to live at least as long as my trinitron-based TV, not less. Thank you for your experiences!
We had a client's ~50-inch plasma display at work for a few months, (we were developing a custom advertising banner type application), and we brought in the Dreamcast and gave it a whirl.
To make a long story short, gaming on this particular model (a japanese make, possibly Mitsubishi, but I could be mistaken) was awesome, with one rather glaring exception.
We fired up The House of The Dead 2 and found that the light gun wouldn't work with the plasma unit. Not sure why, maybe somebody who understands the technology of these things better can comment on that...
They (Sony):
Seem to go fuzzy (text wise). This is bad for those strategy gamers out there.
Seem to be suffering from burn-in.
Are widescreen so you need a game that does widescreen resolutions.
Need higher resolutions to avoid seeing all those single pixels.
Are expensive - you could buy a bloody good 21 inch CRT.
I was amazed when I heard Gateway was coming out with a $3000 plasma HDTV. Then I found out why it's so cheap... it's not HDTV. You'll notice no where on their site do they refer to it as an HDTV or capable of DISPLAYING at that high resolution. You'll see stuff like, "capable of accepting 1080I and 720p HDTV signals," or "16:9 Wide Aspect Ratio," or "compatible signals include computer display resolutions up to 1280 X 1024 and HDTV signals including 720p and 1080i."
However, notice the native resolution of the TV is only DVD quality (approximately 480 horizontal lines). That's twice as good as regular TV, but for $3000 I'll either fork out more for a real plasma HDTV, or a little less for a good rear-projection HDTV.
I wonder how many people out there will buy one of these Gateway TV's assuming they are HD, just because they're plasma, 16:9 screens?
"And like that
insert "insert note" about it here.
insert "I win" fez-style note here.
He has the right idea. For the same $, you get a DTS projector. Effectivly arbitrary screen size (your 'pad' doesn't need a 40' projection), multi input, etc etc.
He even had the two tier couch thing going on for movie nights.
I saw him type on an 80x24 screen (at 8' x 5'), play nethack, the origional Zelda, and Gran Turismo. Anything you wanted.
About the only 'downside' is that you must have a decent receiver for your audio (and realistically, some of your video) switching, since your projector won't have any sound capability.
When the time comes for me to upgrade my 36", that's the route I'll go.
Zapman
I'm concerned about refresh and resolution. How do they compare?
I would be much more concerned with burn-in than with any refresh rate. We recently got 5 Panasonic plasmas here at work. They are used to show mostly flash animations and the occasional PowerPoint show. Static images can burn-in within hours. We have to take great care to make sure there is never anything left on screen that can cause burn-in. The worst case I have seen is an IE error message, left on overnight. In the morning, we could actually read the text with the monitor turned off. I would be afraid to run a video game, which has static images like score overlays that never go away.
There is a "white wash" feature, which helps remove the burnt-in image, but it is never totally gone. Often, I will pause a game and leave it for an hour or more. Doing so on a plasma would have disastrous effects.
Aside from the burn-in, I have noticed a reduction in brightness, and this is only since last summer. Not a very good lifetime for a product which cost $20,000 CDN last summer.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
...a couple of years back when plasma displays were not viable. the caveats on plasma are the burn-in and contrast. the caveats on LCD projectors is pixel burn in and contrast. if you get a DLP projector, you will get better contrast but you can still get stuck pixels. a decent projector + screen will cost more than a plasma display and last a little longer. if you're looking at a 2:1 cost ratio, though, then buying plasma might make sense because you can get another one cheaper in 3 years anyway.
The gateway tv is made by acompany called Sampo. This gateway model is the same as the Sampo PME-42S6.
While gateway's tv includes a tuner, the costco one for the same price includes the expensive (200$) wall mounts which are a must have. Assuming you have a cable box or sattilite, and don't use an anntena you are better off with the costco one.
The other posts are correct, the monitor is not HDTV it is EDTV (Enchanced definition television) but the picture still rocks. DVDs look very sharp as does the color, these monitors are far better then HD projection models.
Couple of years ago plasma screens were all the rage at E3 (the industry's annual trade show in L.A., for those that don't know). For reasons that became obvious, most publishers switched back to CRT's the following year.
I don't know exactly where the problem lies and I don't know if it's been fixed in more modern plasma screens, but all the video games I saw at E3 on a variety of different plasma screens looked like crap. Most of the problems were with text - which was generally unreadable - but the graphics in general looked both blurry and harsh at the same time (almost as if you took a still image in Photoshop and did a smart-blur on it, then cranked up the sharpness well past the natural limit).
I suppose two things could help here if you're in the market for one of these sets:
a) you could just get used to the way this looks.
b) higher-end or newer sets may not exhibit the same problems. No doubt you get what you pay for.
But I can tell you most publishers still use CRT's at E3, after the great experiment at going high-tech a couple years ago. Cost is probably a factor, but it's obviously not the only factor, as the gaming press ravaged quite a few games' visuals mainly because they just looked significantly worse on plasma sets than they otherwise would.
Have you looked into using a digital projector? A half decent one runnning 1024x768 can be had for around 2000-3000$. The only downside is you need a room where you can easily make it dark, projectors in the day don't work too well =). I've played GTA3/Q3/Racing Games on a projector and its an absolute blast =]
My room mate played in the Halo National Championships this summer, he didn't say what kind of plasma TV's they were using, but just that some things in the game were too dark on them. Apparently the winning strategy in the final game involved hiding in shadows because you were nearly invisible in the extra-dark shadows on the plasma TV.
All circuits busy.
Display Technologies
It says the useful life of a plasma screen is about 10k hours, or 5 years. Is this plasma technology the same plasma we saw on the old amber screen laptops (think Toshibas, Sniffers (which were Toshibas) etc.)?