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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."
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.
4 states?
What is this? 1990?
We've actually doubled the number of states of matter in the past half century.
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?
>>Make that "one of at over a dozen known phases of matter [wikipedia.org]" , not "one of the four phases".
You might have a point if they had said what you said they did, but they didn't. They referred to four states of matter. As explained in the very article you link to people often confuse state with phase, but they are not the same thing.
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.