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Display Format Technologies Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "The differences between LCD, Plasma, DLP, LCOS, D-ILA, and CRT are revealed, as well as their associated advantages and disadvantages, as Audioholics post a new version of their Display Technologies Guide With advances companies like Intel (LCOS) and Texas Instruments (HD2+) are making in chip technologies and cost reductions, one wonders just how soon CRT based TVs will become an antiquity we discuss with our grandchildren as they install their new high resolution, lightweight, affordable displays on their walls."
Always good to shoot for good Ausio/Video Equipment like speakers and monitors, since they last longer than PC internals and they aren't pushed into obsolecence as quickly. I'll keep using my 17" CRT monitor untill it dies. Then I'll look at a 21" perhaps...
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Plasma sucks!
After paying an arm and a leg for a Plasma screen, I can honestly say that it sucks... worst dollar to value ratio ever. The resolution is okay (I'm not talking about the gateway/circuit city peice of shit that has EDTV resolution)... the picture isn't anywhere near as good as you can get with LCD or DLP... I really don't understand why Plasma still exists!
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Wake me up when the industry figures this out. Now _that_ will blow everything out of the water.
Flat CRT's are damned nice if you have room and are cheaper than a comparable LCD, My girlfriend got one of the newer eMachines packages with the 17" CRT and if I had the room in my dorm i would have gone for one of those displays
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I won't buy CRT rear projection or plasma because of the burn in problem. Why is noone looking to fix this major problem with these types of TVs, that prevent much normal use? For now, I'm sticking with a 36-inch Toshiba picture tube set. (which Consumer Reports rated a 'best buy' in traditional CRT televisions) LCDs are AFAIK the only 'new' technology immune from burn-in. (traditional TVs aren't completely immune from this problem, but it is unlikely to happen with normal use) Also, plasmas degrade over time, and in 10 years are completely dim to the point of being unwatchable. So, devide your price of the plasma ($3000) by ten to get a price of $300/year for your plasma TV. With LCD projection, there is the extreme high cost of bulbs. Why should a bulb cost so much anyway?? The hourly rate of an LCD projector can be in upwards of 30 cents. Is there a way to win?
System administrators (especially UNIX sysadmins) probably spend a lot more time looking at console-type displays (eg: xterms, kterms, what have you) than other users, which means many hours a day looking at a stereotypically black little box with small white writing on it. That can really make your eyes tired. What type of display do sysadmins prefer? Once I started using a laptop for a lot of my work, I found it really difficult to go back to my CRT-based desktop at home. Terminal fonts just looked...fuzzy. Doing a lot of command line work on an LCD is a pleasure for the eyes. Are there any hardcore apt-get users out there willing to comment? If you need to spend a day with dselect upgrading your cluster or whatnot, do you prefer an LCD panel or a CRT? Or perhaps the new VRML apt-get interface and a pair of VR goggles?
The article is an excellent beginner's guide to display technology formats, however, they make that oft-repeated forcast that soon LCDs will be cheap. We've been hearing that for years. Active-Matrix displays have been in use in Notebooks for 10 years and still they are the most expensive part of the notebook. They've certainly come down in price, but I wonder why so many people latch onto this belief that soon they will be so cheap they'll replace everything. Every couple years we hear about a world-wide "supply shortage" which jacks the price of LCDs up about 20%, there are inherent limitations in the design process which require an entirely separate production line to produce a 15" display, a 19", etc... What about Hot-Pixels? How happy would you be to spend $10k on an LCD display that has hotpixels?
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
If Kodak is in charge then it is doomed. They are the modern day xerox when it comes to marketing what they make. Hell, they had to move production of film off shore because they could no compete with Fuji Film because Kodak said it is too expensive to make film in the USA. Fuji Film is made in America.
I'm so sick of people trying the predict the end of the CRT, and how digital displays will take over. ...) that can rival a CRT when it comes to what matters most: quality.
I have not seen ONE digital display (whether it be LCD, Plasma
CRT screens just look better. The colours are always alive, blacks are black (not grey), and white are white.
Every plasma screen I have seen, sharp though the image may be, is horribly grainy when it comes to colour. It's just like watching something in 16 bit colour.
The CRT has been around for almost a century (I might be wrong), and you know why? Because it works. It doesn't need to be replaced, so please stop trying to bring forth its demise.
I fear that one day, there'll be a generation out there who will never have known the quality of a nice CRT, the beauty of film, and the smooth sound of a nice vinyl record.
The article was slashdotted, heres my personal guide:
CRT - Still probably capable of the best picture for now (especially at the high end, think G90). Requires much more maintenance than digital technlogies (convergence, etc.). Essentially infinite on/off contrast, not quite as good ANSI contrast. No screendoor. High end guns capable of fully resolving 1080p.
DLP - Best contrast numbers of the digital technologies. Consumer units limited to 720p for now. Screendoor is pretty limited. Some people may see rainbows on one chip devices due to color wheel (pretty limited on new HD2+ machines). Most machines not terribly bright when compared to LCD. Limited to projection devices.
LCD - Poor contrast, very hight black level. Most screendoor of the digitals. Can be in projection or panel configurations. Considerably less expensive than other digital techs. Scales to higher resolutions than DLP for now.
LCOS - Least screendoor of digital technologies. Often appears "smoothest" or most like a CRT to people. Contrast numbers not up to DLP's standards. Not a large number of LCOS unites on the market for now, but looks like more will be coming soon. Many see it as the ultimate sucessor to CRT rear-projection.
Plasma - Least bang for the buck of the digitals. Only a flat-panel technology, no projection. Reletively poor contrast numbers.
I still can't figure out why the gamma on the PC and the Mac are so far apart. Hell, the gamma on a windows system is much lower than a Mac and even darker than a CRT TV!!!
The Gamma on Macs has traditionally been 1.0, this is good because a color value of 64 is half as bright as 128. This is really bad because a value of 1 is half as bright as 2. This results in stairstepping in dark areas of images. There is a standard for images in browsers BTW, any reasonable browser will show images at the same brightness. It comes down to the old Mac vs. PC thing, Mac's made things simple at a cost to quality and PC's did things right at a cost to ease of use. SGI's did both at a cost in dollars (they used 12 bits instead of 8 bits per channel, so you could have a gamma of 1.0 but still have good quality images, or not if you wanted great images to output to film).
Oh, LCD's are linear (gamma 1.0) while Monitors are not (1.7) so on an 8 bit per channel LCD you don't lose anything with the 1.0 gamma on Macs, since all the darks suck no matter what. With 12 bits, it again doesn't matter. That said 3 out of 5 screens I use regularly are LCDs, they take up less space and weigh a little less to boot.
After Viewing All other technologies (at the time), I purchased two televisions - One A CRT Projection Sony (HDTV) 46" and a Panasonic Plasma (EDTV) 42" (both highly recommended on almost every method of research I performed). Hands down, the Panasonic kicks the Sony's ass, I have NEVER seen a better picture (I've only been to best buy, circuit city and The Big Screen Store, and there ilk). The real word black level performance (eye candy view) is just as good. Matter of fact, I bought the plasma just because the room that it's in was so small. I planned on using the Sony most of the time, especially for movies. The plasma is so much better, the CRT justs sits there most of the time.
I guess I'm ahead of the curve -- I bought a Sharp XV-H37U projector nearly eight years ago. It was one of the first three-panel LCD projectors that had decent picture quality.
I too was worried about bulb life... since they cost $400-$500 each. I was doubly worried regarding the lifetime since I bought a floor model that had an unkown history to it. (Back then the projector was a $6000 investment, buying a floor model saved nearly $2000)
However, nearly eight years later I'm still on the original bulb, with no perceptible degredation of brightness. At this point, I'm hoping that the bulb dies so I can justify a modern projector! So far, it's refusing.
Now the caveats: I'm my home theater I have both the projector and a traditional CRT-based TV. I use the TV for all normal TV watching and only use the projector for nighttime movies and special TV shows. Once the projector is on, it averages 4-6 hours of use, but I'm very careful not to needlessly power cycle it.
I believe that with some common sense, the bulb-life issue doesn't really exist.
Honestly though, someone needs to do something about lamp life. They've made some pretty good strides with decreasing bulb cost, but I still don't want to be replacing a bulb every few months.
You can run a 2000 hour bulb 40 hours a week and it will still last 50 weeks.
With my usage, I think my projector's bulb will last another two years.
There are some front projectors that have 3000 hr bulbs, a few even have 5000 hour ratings. Sometimes one can trade brightness for bulb life.
What I will do when the bulb runs out, I don't know because so much can change. It's possible that some dark horse can arrive on the scene, heck, even Intel is thinking of getting into LCOS chip fabbing. While not as techically sexy as DLP's micromirrors, I think there's some room for improvement in those devices, so one can get a decent picture without DLP's rainbows.
I suppose it's possible that with TI's DLP patents running out, maybe we'll even see three-chip DLP units for home theater and that would squash my biggest complaint about it, the rainbows.
I manage 6 conference rooms with a projector in each. Average use of each room is 20 hrs/week. One of the projectors was used when I got it 4 years ago and I just replaced its bulb before Xmas. It's the first bulb I've replaced. All projectors are Epsons.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Poor pigment life has killed them commercially until a new generation of longer life ones can be developed (if at all). While people complain about plasma the avg life of older units is 30K hours and the newer generation is 60K, thats a LONG time. Lamp based units have fairly expensive bulbs to replace but at least you aren't scrapping the whole tv.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
However, nearly eight years later I'm still on the original bulb, with no perceptible degredation of brightness. At this point, I'm hoping that the bulb dies so I can justify a modern projector! So far, it's refusing.
Umm, you may want to reconsider that. According to the manual for my projector, a bulb that is used longer than the reccommended 2000 hours can explode.
Buy yourself a new bulb, you can probably get one cheap on ebay.