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Technology Behind Plasma Displays
digg writes "CoolTechZone.com has an in-depth article that gives an overview of how Plasma Displays work. From the article: 'So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity. Plasma can be produced if a gas is energized enough to split the molecules into positive and negatively charged ions. Mostly, the plasma displays use a mixture of noble gases like Neon and Xenon."
Of course, you can get all this (and more) at Wikipedia's Plasma Display page.
;-)
[I realize this is probably karma whoring, but I hate it when there's only one link in summary and it doesn't even have much info, and is littered with ads, and you have to look at 3 pages to get the whole article. That and run on sentences.]
--Xandu
I hate to be totally pedantic (mildly pedantic is usually sufficient), but I read the first two paragraphs of this and had to stop. It reads like a creative writing exercise in poor writing. Too many words that need to be cut, laden with cliches. I rarely read the articles around here, are they really this bad? I'll stick to scanning the comments for "+5 Funny", thanks.
Ben Garrison, a mindless idiot who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
KARMA SLUT
4 states?
What is this? 1990?
We've actually doubled the number of states of matter in the past half century.
I'd personally be more interested in reading a comparison of Plasma and LCD. Preferably one that I could stand reading without my attention immediately turning to something else.
"Now the problem in plasma (unlike OLED) is that the light photons thus released belong to the Ultraviolet band and are therefore invisible to human eyes. This was where researchers got hitched until someone came up and suggested that they use these UV photons to incite visible light photons. Now to better understand this concept, lets look at how a normal plasma display is constructed."
Now call me chicken and fry me in Kentucky, but isn't that exactly how fluorescent tubes work (and even to some extent cathode ray tubes).
HTF did the 'researchers' managed to get hitched on the problem, it plain fucking obvious.
My discreet math professor, Dr. Bitzer showed us some of the original designs he had of the plasma screen (which was originally was developed for his distance learning program) he told us that the original problem most designers were having was that they were trying to put the capictors (resisters for the alternating current) inside of the plasma chamber which made the displays too clunky
he showed us his original working model
Make that "one of at over a dozen known phases of matter" , not "one of the four phases".
Every long-term plasma display installation I have seen (train stations, malls, building foyers), have lots of broken, noisy pixels. As if a burn-in effect had occured. I took this problem into account when designing a display about 4 years ago, by randomly placing images/text (within constraints) and this still occured.
I would be really pissed off if this happened to me on one of these super expensive displays. What's more, have they made plasma look good yet? I've never seen a plasma display which looked good. Even when opperated at their native resolution through digital interfaces.
To me, they seem way overpriced for the quality and durability you get.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If only chicks went down as easy as that server.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
"Phased plasma rifle in a 40 watt range." "Hey, just what you see here, pal."
"Nature bats last..."
"Mostly, the plasma displays use a mixture of noble gases like Neon and Xenon."
What happens if you use one of the decadent gases?
Maybe they should have called the televisions "Ion Displays" instead?
This article mistakes plasma altogether. Plasma is a state of matter in which the electrons are so high in energy that they escape the pull of the nucleus and more or less become free flowing. It is laughable that the poster mentioned that a molecule splits into positive and negative ions upon reaching the state of plasma and then mentions noble gases which do not even form molecules (unless specially prodded). Atoms do become ionized during plasma phase but only because of the displacement of electrons: making all of the ions positive.
Instead of simply vaporizing the poster- we should "plasmatize" him? Maybe he can learn something in the process.
... consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert
Ummm, no. Plasma is anything but inert. All those free radicals running around are very reactive.
Four states of matter?
Has the author been living in a hole? Even being conservative I think you'd have to plump for there being 5 states of matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_matter
That's aside from the poor wording which suggests that there are 7 states (or perhaps that's what he meant??).
'So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity.
"Makes the gas more inert?" Those guys should stick to writing about case mods.
Plasma panels have actually been around since the 1960s, as neon-red displays. The early concept was that a sustaining voltage applied to all pixels kept them lit if they were on, and an X/Y array of wires could be used to turn individual pixels on and off. Thus, the display itself had memory, back when having enough memory to refresh the display was expensive.
Color, intensity variation, and speed took a long time to achieve. Now there are transistor drivers behind every pixel, and the panel is built in what's effectively a big wafer fab. But that's not the toughest part of the manufacturing problem. All the electronics is on the back glass, while the phosphors are on the front. These two big pieces of glass have to be welded together with subpixel precision, held in contact only by millions of tiny ridges that have to match up. That's the most difficult step, and the one that limits display size.
Mirrordot only has the 1st page. If you want a mirror of all the pages, look here.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
No magic, nor gnomes? Ha! And you call this technology?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
``To me, they seem way overpriced for the quality and durability you get.''
Also compared to other technologies? What technology would you chose for a 50" flat display, if not plasma? Note: I'm not an expert on these things, but I'm genuinely curious.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
In our cleanroom, we use plasmas for etching silicon. Plasma etching is a standard process that is used in the manufacturing of just about every chip. The plasma in TV-screens is generated in the same manner as the plasma in our etching machines. Therefore I have to conclude that plasma screens will suffer from the etching, and will not have a long lifetime. Add to that the amazing energy consumption, and my choice for my next TV is made: LCD, or maybe even another CRT. I still think CRT monitors give a better poicture than LCD, and for TV's the difference is even greater.
-- Cheers!
Is there something stopping people from making a high-definition CRT TV? Most of the TVs I see that support more than 480 lines are not chunky enough to be CRTs.
Yet I have this CRT with a VGA interface that supports up to 1600x1200 resolution. It cost about $80 and is 19" diagonally. It seems that small and mid-size HD TVs could be made by just slapping a TV tuner onto a computer display.
Would it cost a lot to make a large (30-50 inches) CRT Television that supported more than 480 lines?
consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines
WTF does this have to do with Plasma vs. CRT? This is a limitation of analog vs. digital, not of any one display type.
Seriously, think for a second. You're whining that your TV doesn't have great resolution when monitors are usually at least 1024x768. Um. Most monitors are still CRTs! I had a CRT that did 1600x1200 for years!
Remember, plug a plasma TV into a coaxial cable plugged into standard analog cable TV, and you're going to get 640x480, no matter what the plasma is capable of.
I'm not sure if I even want to finish reading the article after that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I have a 50" Samsung 3rd Gen DLP TV ($1600 at Best Buy a few months ago, 0% APR for 2 years). I could not be happier with it. Not only does it have more HD ports than any TV I found in its price range (VGA, DVI, HDMI, 2 x Component), the color and contrast ratio are outstanding (1500:1 claimed) using a 7-segment color wheel (and no, I do not see the rainbow effect, I believe partly die to the higher rotation rate of the 7 segment wheel). Not only that, but it does not suffer from burn-in or fading the way plasma does (important for me for gaming). The only part that needs periodic replacing is the lamp unit itself, which you can find online for around $200, and according to other people with similar sets to mine, each lamp lasts 2-3 years, depending on use. The power savings of DLP over plasma or CRT more than makes up for it, I believe the set I have uses 60-70 W during normal use. In the long run, I don't see plasma sticking around. I see technologies like DLP and LCoS (or D-ILA as JVC calls their version) being the market leaders in 5 years. Plasma always looks over-saturated and grainy to me, not to mention the heat that comes off those things. They might be a little brighter than most DLPs, but I do not believe they are worth it. The only plus side is their depth, 4" versus 14" or so for my DLP.
today is spelling optional day.
Plasma screens will vanish as suddenly as they appeared once this stuff arrives. It's already production-viable in small versions for mobile phone displays and the like, where it is destroying LCD (the only other technology used in those devices) as you read this.
Then for now, there's plasma and LCD.
There is also SED/FED coming.
If you just mean flat, there are many projection TVs, with LCD, DLP and LCOS (LCOS under various names) to choose from. Some of these are as thin as 12", even the deep ones are under 20" deep, which isn't bad for a 60" projector. These don't have the same viewing angle as the hang-on-the-wall types, but are a lot cheaper and often have a better picture.
I saw a friend's brand-new (model) Pioneeer last night. He's had it for about 3 months, and I could already see words burnt into the left and right areas (outside the 4:3 box). The burnt-in text was quite readable. And the borders of the 4:3 box were noticeable too. That disgusted me, burn-in is very bothersome. I had heard that it wasn't a problem on new plasmas, but apparently that's not quite true.
After hating on plasma due to power useage/heat, thickness/weight, flicker/sparkle/ugly darks, low-resolution and burn-in, I was kind of warming up to it.
Seeing the true 1920x1080 TVs out now, the difference between them and the normal 1024x768 plasmas, the resolution differences are not as significant as I expected.
The problem with flicker/sparkle/ugly darks on plasma is greatly reduced from 3 years ago. Flicker/sparkle/dither patterning is not apparent much anymore. The ugly darks are better looking, but still noticeable.
Power usage/heat is down too, although it's still more than competiting technologies.
All those improvements really moved plasma up in my eyes, even considering it for my next TV. But honestly, the burn-in problem is not improving as much as I expected, so I have to rule it out again.
LCD looks great, but I want 50+ inches, and I don't see those coming down to a price I want to pay soon.
So I guess it's back to projection. The new LCOS units are going to have a huge impact.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
check the weight of a 36" CRT hdtv.
but their weakness is black levels. Nothing is perfect.
This explains the excessive number of talk shows and intrascendent screenplays on my countrys daily air TV shows.
It's because of my new plasma TV!.
For instance, consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines. Compare this to at least 1024x768 resolution...
...apart from the new attractive technology they use instead of the mundane CRT
What is he trying to say here? He's telling us that the resolution on a TV sucks compared to that of a computer, then uses it as a reason to change monitor technologies from CRT to plasma. Hey, the 1024x768 resolution he mention generally comes from a CRT.
Plasma displays are not new. They were invented back in the 60s or earlier (I remember reading about them in the 60s).
Now the problem in plasma (unlike OLED) is that the light photons thus released belong to the Ultraviolet band and are therefore invisible to human eyes.
There is nothing inherent in plasma technology that requires the use of ultraviolet. In fact, the 'plasma' word sounds cool, but we're really talking about the same technology that's used to power the little neon indicator lights in old radios, and the neon displays you find all over the place -- not to mention fluorescent lights, mercury vapor lamps, low and high pressure sodium lamps, and the like.
But the word "plasma" does sound cool and high-tech, not to mention expensive.
-solid
-fluid
-gas
-bec (bose-einstein-condensation
Plasma is ionized gas! The list the author makes is as dump as saying 'the states are Jim, tree, cat, river, July, cloud, tower,...'.
Personally, I got more useful understanding out of this article at howstuffworks:a y.htm
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/plasma-displ
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
NT
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I've bought a plasma big screen about a year ago and now the first pixels are already starting to die. After speaking to several people in the field and doing some research on the subject I found out that this is completely normal for plasma screens and that their life span is inherently limited to about 5-7 years. I am enraged that stores don't tell you this at all. My next big screen will be either a LCD or a projection screen.
Bad spelling and grammar, less than average-joe-sixpack grasp of the principles involved.
If only the quality of the article were proportional to the amount of traffic he received today...
My motorbike travels in Chile.
To pedantically correct the original poster, there are *at least* six states of matter, possibly more.
1) Solid
2) Liquid
3) Gas
4) Plasma
5) Bose-Einstein condensate
6) Fermionic condensate
I now take my Physics-pedant hat off and apologise.
I see no mention here of a technolgy that was delveloped about 10 or 15 years ago to produce large flatscreen television based on CRT technology.
The idea is this. Remember back in the 1980's when all you had was basically CRT screens and nothing else. Somebody then realisied that you could arrange a large number of CRTs in a grid array and produce a much bigger picture by sending a segment of the video signal to each screen.
It was then noticed that this large array of CRT had a much thinner profile than having on very large CRT. What happened was that one of the CRT manufacturers of the time decided to construct a large panel screen by using several thousand small CRTs in an array, each one emulating a function of a pixel.
Looking at the description of large plasma displays, the technology in arranging pixels very similar (the only different being the method used to generate the charge to generate the phosphor glow). It may be that using CRTs was too expensive, and plasma was cheaper to use.
Any body else know about this technology?
"There are limitations to CRT that are being felt increasingly as the need for higher resolution televisions increase each day. For instance, consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines."
What are they talking about??
Most computer montiors are CRTs and there's nothing limited about them, IIRC they still beat plasma and LCD displays in terms of resolution (last I remember even really big plasma screens were limited to 1024 px across, and 17" LCDs are usually 1280. My cheap, several years old 17" crt can do 1600x1200 readably
The only reason CRT TVs are limited to 480 lines is because that's the resolution of the legacy TV signal.
I was expecting a load of sales talk about HDTV plasma screens being so much better then these antique CRT displays but instead the rest of it is just a load of Star Trek esq technobable.
I'm sorry but this article isn't informative, it's not even trying to sell something, what's it's point?? Maybe it's just to rack up clicks on the google ads?
Check out the following:
Plasma Cosmology
Plasma Universe
Guided Tour of the Plasma Universe
Electric Currents and Transmission Lines in Space
Immense Flows of Charged Particles Discovered Between the Stars
Interesting quote from Hubble regarding redshift:
Thuderbolts.info
Thunderbolts' Picture of the Day
Picture of the Day Archive
A few very interesting selections from the archive:
The Picture that Won't Go Away
Quasars in Infrared are Still Nearby
Predictions on "Deep Impact"
Electric Stars
Of Pith Balls and Plasma
Space Shuttle Struck by Megalightning?
The website of Halton Arp
The Observational Impet
IC XC NIKA
>
Well this sure ain't obvious to me.
Stupid me -- I thought that a pure soup of super-heated ions would be highly chemically reactive -- just the opposite of "inert".
Can somebody clue me in as to why somebody would think that this would be "obvious"?
They just don't know it yet.
With 1080p DLPs starting to ship in quantity (Samsung, Mitsubishi), 1080p LCDs getting speed and contrast (Sharp), LCoS finally getting past the knee in the yield curve (Sony 1080p), and OLED on the horizon, only the completely uninformed would be duped into buying an inefficient, high-heat, burn-in prone, short half-life plasma display.
Just like the H2 girlie Hummer, plasma displays are really only a fit on MTV cribs or elsewhere where money and brains are inversely correlated.
> cat ~/.signature | grep -v bullshit
>
physical states if you include bose-einstein condensates, and what might be refered to as super plasma where not only are the electrons stripped but protons and nuetrons are free flowing
"Plasma displays suck. LCD displays suck, but for different reasons. RP and DLP suck too, as do projectors. CRTs suck least of all, mainly because after 50 years everybody has become immune to the ways they suck.
Buy a CRT, and live with the size and weight. If you really want something bigger than about 80cm then you have another, more easily cured, problem : buy some Viagra."
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?