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Are Plasma TVs the Next BetaMax?
Lev13than writes "An article in the Toronto Star questions whether the battle between LCD and Plasma is the next VHS vs. Beta: "LCD is now in plasma country, and this means war — a war some say plasma can't hope to win". Rationale for LCD's victory include plasma's burn-in vs. LCD's ruggedness, improved images and falling prices. While the Beta analogy isn't particularly helpful (since both technologies play the same content), the article does raise interesting points."
And when they do, they're prohibitively expensive to replace.
Since so many of these are new, they won't fade for about two years - if Plasma is still around, you may see the tide change....
Then my CRT must be a wax cylinder :(
Strangely enough, it doesn't suffer from uneven fade or blurring and has survived years with the kids knocking against it and still looks damn good.
I must really be behind the times if I want to pay more money for something with less quality and features...
liqbase
Of the currently commercial available technologies, I'd predict that DLP will be the long-term winner.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It costs less than a plasma or LCD, has no Burn in, needs less electricity and works great. I've choosen the Sony KDF-E50A11, and i've never looked back. The only downside is that every 6000 hours i have to change the lamp, which costs about 180,00$.
:))
(This is not a commercial, i'm just a happy customer
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
An article in the Toronto Star [CC] questions whether the battle between LCD and Plasma is the next VHS vs. Beta
VHS vs. Beta was a battle in which a consumer who made the wrong choice was left with hardware that increasingly ceased to be useful, because it wasn't supported. Choosing a plasma or an LCD screen isn't remotely comparable because both will continue to function regardless of who "wins". This is a silly article.
If you mean "both provide basically the same functionality with no overwhelming superiority of one technology over another", then yeah, it's a VHS vs. Betamax battle. Of course, the outcome will also be decided by which one can show porn the best.
I guess it's too much to ask an AC to read through the full summary: "While the Beta analogy isn't particularly helpful (since both technologies play the same content)..."
This guy's the limit!
...is nebulous at best and far from neutral.
I've seen many Plasma TVs, and even LCD ones, in many electronic stores and the picture quality of all of them is absolutely shocking compared to an ordinary CRT. Colour, in particular, is a problem.
Yes, they're slightly cool looking, they save space and they're lighter, but I've seen more than one person shake their head sceptically when they've seen the picture quality and then looked at those 'HD Ready' logos slapped all over them. Quite frankly, I think both of them are Betamax, but I think a Betamax versus VHS comparison is wrong. They're both crap.
There is one plasma at my condo; however, it belongs to my roommate and the rules are no video games. CNET had an article which stated the first hundred hours are the most critical to prevent burn in, and after that time it's ok to play video games. However, the majority of manufacturers still recommend in their operators manual for plasmas not to play video games. The article's mention of burn-in is a constant worry, especially with news stations that leave thier logo up all day. For my XBOX 360, I still don't know what to get. I really don't want the size of a DLP; however the LDCs I have played on still leave some "trails" and are quite expensive. Does anyone have any recommendations for gaming? I have to be ready for Madden 07 this Tuesday.
-- The Arizona Kid
There's a big difference here - if you bought a BetaMax deck, you couldn't get new movies, but if you get a Plasma, you'll be able to use it through its whole lifespan. The availability of plasma displays in the future shouldn't affect your purchasing decision now.
I don't get this comparison at all. To me, the big deal with something like Beta vs VHS is that once you make a purchase, you're committed to a format. That isn't the case here. The manufactures, I suppose, could see it this way because they have to commit quite a bit of their resources to produce one type or the other, but to the consumer it doesn't matter. If, rich bastard that you are, you invest in a whopping big plasma TV now, and find that it doesn't suit your needs in a few years, you're not going to feel like you're stuck using plasma TVs. You'll buy the TV that suits your needs... it won't be like you've got dozens of Beta tapes sitting around to influence your decision.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I've always thought of Plasma as the ISDN of TV technology -- it's an 'in-between' solution that is less than ideal and expensive, but provides a level of capability that early adopters and the rich are willing to pay for. Eventually it will pass from the scene, but for a limited number of people for a limited amount of time, it will do the job.
Personally, I expect SED to win over the high-end because it shares the strenght of CRT televisions with the large screen size and small form factor of LCD/Plasma. The middle-end should be split between LCD and the better DLP projections, while the low-end will be the cheap DLP projections and whoever can put out the smaller tvs for the best price (read: who gets the walmart account).
Anyways, they should have at least mentioned it to make their story complete from a 2006/2007 point of view.
Discuss...
.. when I started my hunt for a HDTV. But TVs in my budget had a huge difference in PQ between LCDs and Plasmas (With Plasmas being the clear winners). So I ended up buying a plasma. I think that for now (And for near future), plasmas are still going to have the best PQ. And don't forget the status symbol that plasmas are. If Joe has heard about HDTVs, he'd want to buy a plasma because (a) For a lot of people, an HDTV means plasma (Others are look-alikes), and (b) PQ in a plasma makes him see the difference between SDTV and HDTV even from up-close. Not so much with LCDs and DLPs, and (c) He knows that if he buys a 'Plasma', he'll get a 'Whoaaaa !!!' from his friends. But just an 'Eh!' if he bought anything else. Eventually, LCDs will evolve to plasma quality and will get cheaper. At the same time LCDs will have lesser issues, better resolution, less power consumption, longer life and lighter weight. So people will start moving for them. But looking at the slow pace of evolution in this field, I don't see that happening very soon (At least a couple of years). DLPs and its sisters are just stop-gaps. These technologies are not going to stay for long. LCDs will eat every other technology for lunch as soon as it becomes affordable.
To call this a beta vs vhs battle is completely wrong
Beta was far better than vhs but lost in the price war Vhs being cheaper of course.
This seems to be just what the consumer needs to help drive down prices
as both technologys are very expensive although they are getting better picture wise.
I'll be keen to see samsungs new slim crt which is also HD ready.
Most of that information is dated (screen sizes especially since 65" LCD's can be found from several companies).
And a lot more is PR crap/scare-monger to try and sway the consumers to their line of products. As stated Sony doesn't make plasmas anymore, so of course they will be advocating LCDs since that is ALL they make!
There are "good" plasmas and "poor" plasmas, just like there are "good" LCDs and "poor" LCDs. Giving pure PR crap like this trying to compair your top of the line LCDs against mid to poor quality plasmas is as I said, pure crap. Hell, even Sony plasmas (you know the ones that Sony hasn't made for 18 months which are now at least 2 generations of technology old), Sony THEMSELVES rated them for 60,000+ hours! So how the hell are they now spouting this crap of 40,000 hours when compairing their brand new LCD's against "supposedly" brand new plasmas? Yes, that is correct, they shopped around for their numbers probably finding the cheapest plasma in existance and compaired its technical features against a name branded LCD.
Again, most of this article is about trying to get consumers to purchase their own products. You don't see Panasonic, Philips, or Pioneer putting this kind of crap out there because all three of them produce both LCDs AND plasmas. They will give you more straight up answers as to which one to use for your situation. Not this kind of PR sh--- err --- stuff that Sony is spitting out because they ONLY have LCDs and need to try and drive as many people as they can to purchase them otherwise Sony is left out of the market...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The plasma makers say it doesn't happen any more, but they still warn against watching too much 4:3 unstretched content, and those channel bugs still end up burned in to the display. As LCD goes up in size and quality and down in price, it will push plasma out of the running. Sure, the LCD backlight will fade, but it won't burn in and it doesn't matter what you display (thus no reason to watch distorted content).
DLP, LCD projection and CRT (projection or direct) aren't really competing for the same niche because they aren't thin panels. CRT also has the 4:3 burn-in issue.
Both plasma and LCD accept the same media. The entire world can opt for LCD, the manufacturers can stop selling plasma and your plasma TV will continue to work just fine. Betamax owners on the other hand were lumbered with an arguably technologically superior machine which became progressively less useful as the studios and media manufacturers removed support.
Neither plasma nor LCD are good enough to persuade me to part with my cash. Why should I pay about twice as much as I would for a CRT when the quality's not as good? Plasma's got the burn-in problem, and the power consumption's colossal. LCD screens can't do proper black. Neither cope well with anything but their native resolution, and both completely fall to pieces when there's any kind of fast action on the screen.
The way I see it, they're both stopgap technologies that are persuading impatient people to part with their cash until they can iron the creases out of SED or OLED technology and get them production-ready.
The USA is going to hell in a handbasket are you're worrying about displays.
http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/911.html
All I know is a lot of what I see being called "HDTV" can't do 1080i or 1080p. The units come with a resolution of 1366 x 768 and I consider that "crippled, almost HDTV".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Early in the development of the automobile it wasn't obvious what kind of power plant would prevail. Electric cars were a good deal more civilized than gas or diesel ones. Steam was a better understood technology and had the edge as far as development went.
Once the electric starter and automatic spark advance were developed, the contest was over.
Plasma might become better with more development but I don't think it will get the chance.
There is one plasma at my condo; however, it belongs to my roommate and the rules are no video games.[...]Does anyone have any recommendations
Tell him: "Don't buy expensive shit if you're afraid of using it. That even worse than false canniness. If not retarded."
for the TV industry, sell a product that needs replacing every few years. Worked for bike racks. Yakima and Thule used to sell racks so durable they were only replaced when someone bought a new car and you couldn't buy compatible roof clips. Nowadays critical components are made of cheap plastic that'll wear out in a few years (and good luck buying just the components). I gather it works well for cars too. What's annoying is all the landfills full of busted consumer goods. I mean, would it really be that hard to design these things to be repairable? Probably no more so than making a refillable ink cartridge.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hey, it's still important. In order to fully appreciate the minute photographic evidence in "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Moon", you need to make sure you have a quality TV.
For the consumer market, probably Plasma is dead. LCD TVs are coming down a lot in price and DLP is getting better with the viewing angle issue.
...is BluRay.
LCD backlights will fade unevenly...And when they do, they're prohibitively expensive to replace. Since so many of these are new, they won't fade for about two years - if Plasma is still around, you may see the tide change.
Mine is going on 4 years and no fade at all.
One thing I never liked about plasma was the power consumption. Do they still suck 300+ watts and emit a lot of heat?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That article wasn't very informative or insightful. I'd give it a 2 if it were a comment on /., and that's only on the strength of mentioning the 40,000 hour plasma lifespan vs. 60,000 for LCD.
What I'd really want to know is, specifically, what's the verdict with respect to plasma burn-in? Sony says it's problematic. (And if that's true, why were they selling plasma screens for so long?) Panasonic says, "You get what you pay for." Is that supposed to mean burn-in's not a problem on high-end sets?
With respect to LCDs, okay, so ghosting's less of a problem. Can we be more specific? Just how much has the response time improved? And what about contrast ratio? Viewing angle? Sunlight? Jaggies?
Regarding both formats, what happens at end-of-life? Do they just get dimmer and dimmer? Is there some kind of hard failure in the mechanism that renders the set completely inoperable after a certain amount of time? (E.g.I had a desktop LCD monitor which started to balk at coming out of powersaver mode, until one day, it just refused to come back on at all.) Are product lifespans going up, and to what extent? Either lifespan is fairly impressive, we're talking about 4.5 to 7 years of continuous round the clock usage, and probably twice that given typical usage patterns.
And other than a brief mention in the sidebar, there's nothing about future display technologies that might eclipse both plasma and LCD.
Point being, this article might be helpful to a lay person who reads the Star, but it isn't really suited for a tech audience. Why is it on Slashdot?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
As a writer of an article, one should do more than research the televisions of one company and base all aspects of technology on it. That company, would be Sony as indicated by the author of this article as it is the only manufacturer that is being represented.
This article is filled with entrenched ideas of plasma technology from about half a decade ago, when LCD televisions were prohibitively expensive and small.
It does not need to be restated that this article has no resemblence to the Beta vs. VHS wars as all televisions will continue to be able to display a standard picture, but here are the wrong ideas being perpetrated by this author.
Plasma's burn-in has been eliminated due to algorithms developed by both Samsung and Panasonic to essentially shift on-screen images ever so slightly to avoid a single image to stay in one place. In fact, even if you blasted a pure white image on the screen to purpose for a day (a standard accident, perhaps?) then the technology can even cure that over a day period of standard use.
Black bars will not cause burn-in on today's plasma televisions. Television station logos that sit non-stop in the bottom-right corner are the only culprits. Even most stations have figured out to shift the logo a bit or make it transparent enough that the older plasma television crowd will not have burn-ins.
Sony abandoned its plasma television technology because it just couldn't win. Sony was using glass from another manufacturer, which is a very expensive part. Consumer Reports and CNet routinely choose Panasonic plasmas as the very best because they manufacture the key plasma television components. Likewise, the article states that Sony abandoned it in favor of LCD technology. Sony also abandoned the tube television technology which was a cornerstone of the company's name. One would imagine a specialist, nay a leader, in tube television technology would have been most adept at establishing plasma technology.
Plasma televisions are not hot. Hovering one's hand above the vents of plasma televisions today reveal no more heat than a standard television, except suspiciously on brands such as Sony or Akai. Go through a Best Buy and feel the lack of heat emanating from a Pioneer, LG, Samsung, or Panasonic. In fact, Samsung did use to have fans to cool its plasma, but over time it has been eliminated.
Now for some editorializing... I pass by three plasma televisions every day in a work environment. A Samsung plasma hangs suspended from a ceiling displaying a static computer display giving graphical and textual read-outs. The display never changes interface except a screensaver comes up every thirty minutes. It does not have burn-in when somebody gets caught surfing the web on it by accident (I always find that one funny). A Sony plasma hangs in the boardroom, it is hardly on except for a teleconference, and it works day in and day out with just a face on it most of the time. A Panasonic plasma plays video non-stop in the breakroom and is only turned off at night. That display is smaller than the rest at 42 inches, but it is phenomenal color-wise and it hasn't failed either. Plasma technology is not terrible. It's very good. LCDs do not offer lighter weight or thinner enclosures than plasma (so far). LCD panel televisions will defeat plasma in the situation where it becomes thinner, lighter, larger, and more beautiful displaying images (this encompasses the entire image quality and motion playback attributes) in a fast enough time with a matching price to plasma on size. The problem is that plasma if you look online is far cheaper than an equivalent LCD panel television. Retail chains are making a load of money off of plasma units in-store. LCD television technology is priced exactly as it is worth in both on and off-line venues.
I'm just glad the author of the article didn't compare this to the Wii vs. Playstation 3 war or the Zune vs. iPod war.
Sure, CRT's are cheap and great, but have you ever tried to move a large CRT? You need a crane! or 4 beefy guys from the gym.
Being a scrawny nerd with no muscle tone makes moving CRT's a problem. It's primary reason I dumped my nice 19 inch CRT monitor for an LCD.
I'm not sure this competition really matters.
The real deal will be when we are all wearing universal glasses (with earbuds included). Ones that will be able to recieve inputs from our moble computing device. It will function as our complete data center: PC, TV, streaming video, gaming console, etc. The unit will simply be a 1 pound keyboard with a minumum (flash memory?) drive to connect to the central server. In terms of sharing data with other viewers - instead of crouching over a monitor together - well, I'll let you security freaks in the audience work and the encryption and authentication aspects.
Of course the logical extension will be when all of this gets replaced with contact lens units.
I've always thought of Plasma as the ISDN of TV technology -- it's an 'in-between' solution that is less than ideal and expensive, but provides a level of capability that early adopters and the rich are willing to pay for. Eventually it will pass from the scene, but for a limited number of people for a limited amount of time, it will do the job..
Once 50" LCDs become common place, Plasma is dead.
... are why I pretty much filter out tech-related stuff when I read the newspaper (I'm in Toronto). It's like I tell my mom and dad: anything tech-related that you read about in the newspaper or see on the nightly news, I already know about and what you've heard is wrong, anyways.
http://www.chmodoplusr.com/
A far more concerning problem with the proliferation of gargantuan TV sets is their ridiculous power consumption, which is greater than that for LCDs by 50% (comparing constant area).
The cost of ownership of a Plasma should therefore be a significant factor in any decision to purchase one. And need I say anything about climate change?
OLEDs anyone? At least you don't lose half the transmitted intensity to the polarizers.
We're talking about a population who will pay $5000 to forever watch the same crap low definition signal but now at the wrong aspect ratio. Almost every installed LCD/Plasma I've seen has the standard low def signal stretched out to fit the snazzy widescreen. If people can't even get that right how can we expect them to intelegently choose one tech over another? Or a better question; Why bother with HD at all when 90% of the pop can't even tell that the TV they watch day in day out is grossly distorted?? I also wonder if average Joe Dumbass is morbidly obese partly because he thinks it's the norm, after all everybody on TV these days seems to be really big (wide) and they're all popular...
Beta is a format and plasma is a technology.
The principle of competitive exclusion applies to formats.
The law of supply and demand applies to technologies.
Beta v. VHS (like consoles) depends a lot on 3rd party software (movies) and how they are released. Plasma and LCD will, for the foreseeable future, cater to the same audience and there won't be the pressure from movie makers to go one way or the other. If plasma can maintain its price to be competitive... this is all that will matter.
http://www.lumenlab.com/
you will never look back
Am I the only one that thinks digital projectors could leave both these technologies in the dust? I know there are some drawbacks (high cost, bulb life), but as far as the big-screen pissing contest goes digital projectors are untouchable.
It's comical listening to your friends brag about their 60 inch bigscreens and then you have them over to your place and watch their egos crumble when they first set eyes on the 12 foot screen hanging on your wall.
Not only that but the hardware is highly portable; you can easily take it to a party or some other event to set up for guests. And it takes up very little space in your living room. You can even use it to give business presentations on the road.
Until we can buy rolls of OLED wallpaper to turn entire walls into digital displays I will be sticking with the projector.
What about Organic LED TVs?
If Plamsa is Betamax, and LCD is VHS, is OLED DVD?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
When I was in high school back in the 70's, I worked in a TV shop. It wasn't that hard to make any color TV look good or bad, depending on the lighting. Under florescent lights, since most of them are more toward the higher end of the light spectrum, you have to add the compliment of blue, which is red to make the picture look "better". The problem with monitors, computer or TV is that almost everyone "sees" color a little different. What looks good to one person, looks like crap to someone else. I could set up a tv and make it look good to me, but then after it was delivered, we would usualy have to tweak it for the customer, to look good to them. I always found that if you adjusted the colors for flesh tones on a live tv show, to the end user, then pretty much everything else would look good. I have a PSD picture file that I downloaded somewhere (huge file) with a lot of color stripes, flesh tones etc. I use that to set tv's and monitors to start with, then let the end user tell me what looks best to them.
Betamax and VHS were battles for compatibility, you could not play a Beta Video on a VHS machine. LCD screens and Plasma both play the same signals, in that sense there is no comparison with the VHS Betamax story.
Pioneer releases 50-inch, 1080p PRO-FHD1 plasma
e s-50-inch-1080p-pro-fhd1-plasma/
http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/13/pioneer-releas
I bought a Sony KDS-R50XBR1 earlier this year. This is a 50" 1080p rear projector using Sony's SXRD (LCoS) technology. I compared this set head to head with plasma, LCD, and DLP sets at the biggest electronics store in Chicago, and the SXRD had the best picture - even better than the top Pioneer plasma. This technology has several advantages, most notably a seamless picture that doesn't show the pixels, and no DLP rainbow effect. I will have the change the bulb every few years, but that's not a huge deal, especially considering it was just over half the cost of the Pioneer plasma.
Did I just fall into a time vortex and it's 2003 again?
I work for a major consumer electronics company (one of our joint ventures is a leading LCD manufacturer) and back in 2003 plasma's death was widely predicted on the grounds that burn-in was a horrible problem and LCD sizes were getting big enough for everything except perhaps top-end American markets... believe me or not, but many Europeans and Asians prefer their screens to be somewhat smaller than 60" lest the damn thing won't fit in the house.
However, in recent years plasma has made a remarkable come-back. Burn-in isn't nearly the issue it was three years ago and in fact by some metrics, plasma is currently growing faster than LCD.
I'm still an LCD man myself, but we still can't write off plasma. It'll be here for some time to come.
When I bought my HDTV, I considered all technologies available for under $3500 or so. The diversity in techologies here is a good thing, because it gives the consumer more choice.
Plasma: Wall-mountable, visible pixel grid, burn-in, more expensive for a given size
DLP: Not wall mountable, typically no visible pixel grid, no burn in, requires periodic bulb replacement, rainbows for some people.
LCD RP: Not wall mountable, visible pixel grid, no burn in, requires periodic bulb replacement, issues with dead pixels
That was pretty much led me to choose DLP. The pixel grid issues are getting better, and I've never seen rainbowing on my DLP, but I gather thats an issue with the viewer as much as it is with the television.
In short, I don't want a technology to 'win' because then it hampers my choice and I may be stuck with issues I'd rather avoid.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
On Slashdot, everything is the next BetaMax.
Iridigm Technology, a small company in San Francisco, developed the technology. Unfortunately, Qualcomm purchased the company in 2004. Since Qualcomm tends to charge high fees on its patents, televisions based on OIDs may not materialize any time soon.
Sure, technically LCD wins hands down, but as others have pointed out, LCD can at times be TOO good. Yes, plasma and LCD display HD fantastically, but plasma generally displays SD much better than LCD, which is simply too perfect, and ends up displaying all the encoding artifacts that CRT and plasma blur slightly.
IMHO, Anyone buying a plasma for the next 2 or 3 years is probably on the good side. Once more material and sources for HD are available, then LCD will start to be the best choice.
stuff goes here
If Plasma == BetaMax, does that mean in another year I'll only be able to watch pRon on my plasma TV?
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
CRT is a dinosaur. Resolution is poor
WTF are you talking about? If you don't know, don't post. And moderators, don't fall for something that just *sounds* informative.
CRTs offer *far* better resolution at the present time than LCDs, plasmas, LCoS, DLP, and every other non-military display technology. It's better by a factor of 3 to 5, at each point of the market scale.
The other parts of your post are fairly reasonable, and CRTs will almost certainly go the way of the dodo before long. However, *RESOLUTION* is *NOT* one of their weaknesses. It's pretty much their greatest advantage against other technologies, with their next-best advantage being high contrast ratio.
I was in a Circuit City the other day, casual browsing, and they had a plasma, LCD and DLP display set up, side by side. I didn't have any fancy measuring equipment with me at the time, but without a doubt, the DLP television was far sharper than either of the others (all three were made by the same manufacturer). To me, it wasn't even a contest: Had I money in pocket at that moment, I would have sprung for the DLP TV, hands down. The plasma and LCD displays weren't even close in terms of clarity and brightness.
Westinghouse Digital has almost single-handedly pulled retail prices for quality flat panels down to earth. Its first breakthrough, a little more than a year ago, was the LVM-37W1, a 37" 1080p model which by Christmastime was selling for $1,600. Just a couple of months ago, it released the LVM-47W1, a 47" 1080p model which Crutchfield sells for $2,499 with free shipping and no sales tax outside Virginia. (Who could have imagined a 47", 5"-thick panel that can handle 1920x1080 for under $5,000 a year or even six months ago?!?)
Attaching the panel to a MythTV system and using Bob deinterlacing to double the framerate results in true 1080p video output from ordinary 1080i content that's *better* than anything else out there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Meh. Both have their issues though. Plasma has a life span that really isn't determinable. Its user dependent. However the older notion of it dying in like 5yrs has changed, as more recent technology has more or less fixed this issue in plasmas. However I fail to see how they can still out last an old school crt that has been well cared for. LCD = dead pixels, which are factored into the return policies and not for the good.
...and an article on plasmas
"...Under Dell's policy, which considers a screen defective only if it has six or more faulty pixels..." - from an article on cnets page about dead pixels cnet article
-note that the quote is pulled in reference to a laptop
article
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
First off, betamax has nothing to do with this.
... nor does joe-sumer want two players in his living room. Betamax and VHS were basically mutually exclusive options.
Having two standards for movies meant two distribution chains, two players, two copies of every movie available on both formats, and - you can be sure - some 'exclusive' movies (if it didn't happen, it would today). So basically you have twice the work for two standards. Stores don't want to devote twice the floor space, inventory overhead, warehouse space, shipping and distribution charges
Switch to TVs...I can buy ANY plasma, CRV, DLP, LCD, rear/front projection, portable, or black & white TV and watch south park. The type of TV I get doesn't dictate any other choices. Yes, certain sets have different input options, but that's more relevant to picking a particular mfg or model than the technology. Just like stores stock 15 different DVD players, they stock a variety of TVs. But there's no additional overhead required to stock plasma in addition to LCD. They're going to put the best 50-odd TVs on their floorspace and be done with it. If quantum-spot televisions come out next week...they'll bump their lowest 10 sellers and start stocking new models. Same as when DVD players got progressive scan comb-filter image-perfection options. Your DVD collection stayed the same. Your stereo didn't HAVE to be upgraded. Your TV just sat there looking pretty.
Why won't there be a decisive winner in the TV formats? Simple...because there is no need for one.
Someone might argue about consumers buying the 'better' product and forcing the 'lesser' choices out of the market...but i still see a HELL of a lot of people driving FORDs instead of Mercedes.
>plasma's burn-in vs. LCD's ruggedness,
That's a crock. Plasmas are made out of glass and steel while LCD's are made from plastic. LCD's are rugged? You can break an LCD by pushing it with your finger.
This article raises a valid point that for the price, LCD's are pretty damn good. But they're not superior to plasmas in all regards.
Recently I was in my local Costco store buying a gross of toilet paper, ...
Remember the talk we had about when you tell a story you don't have to include every detail?
This isn't really like BETA vs. VHS at all. In the Beta vs VHS war, one format became an orphan; first Beta prerecorded tapes became scarce and then Beta blank tapes became scarce. Even if plasma displays lose favor, the content providers and equipment manufacturers are not going to stop producing compatible content or input sources. Even if manufacturers declared plasma displays to be the loser tomorrow, the owners of plasma displays are not going to be inconvenienced (at least not until the picture starts to suck).
CRTs are essentially an obsolete display technology, and like plasma displays, they are not going to suddenly become orphans. There have been some very high quality CRT based televisions produced in the past few years, such as the Sony XBR Trinitrons. These high quality CRT displays are not going to become obsolete any sooner than any other display technology of the same vintage. I would expect that the CRT televisions and displays made in the past few years will have longer useful lifes than plasma or LCD displays made during the same time period.
"What's lacking now is labelling to inform the consumer about the electricity consumption of a new TV,"
What? Size = x inches, power consumption = y watts on the label, or an equivalent current at voltage rating (P=VI). If you can't do simple math or look at more than the number of connectors on the back of the TV, then you probably don't care about how much power it consumes to begin with.
Too bad you're not as 'anally picky' (nice mental image there, thanks) about your spelling... :-)
My laptops LCD backlight has been going strong since 1992. Do they truly not make them like they used to?
Look, I like DLP, its what I went with myself, so I think DLP may well have a shot...
But you said you are basing this on casual browsing in a circuit city.
Pretty much all the big stores adjust their sets based on what they are pushing at the moment. So the adjustment and tuning of the sets may vary considerably. I've even seen it where they left a clearly broken models (brightness control shot, or no red on part of screen) on display when they had more in stock.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
>interlacing (why we still use it is beyond me)
When I watch DVD content on my laptop, I often will decide to watch interlaced, rather than the interpolation (non-interlaced) that the computer can hack up. There are different sort of artifacts in both case, in fact, I think that some of the stink (not all) that has been raised about digital clean up for animated content, might actually be due to the viewing method, interlaced or non-interlaced. With outlined flat colors, as with 2d animation, you see a little spiderweb across the lines when viewing 'non-interlaced', the interpolated average. And of course, with interlaced, during movement, depending on exactly how it was digitally mastered for TV at one point or another, you will see the interlaced movement.
As noticeable on a set meant for viewing? I haven't made the comparison. And this is with the lower res DVD standard.
Anyway, most content is, and will be interlaced, and has an NTSC legacy. Is anyone broadcasting 1080p? The only progressive content I am sure I have seen is from my camcorder which creates 30 fps progressive.
If you're actually willing to fork over your money to EA for the next Madden update - which EA has freely admitted will be released for the console with known, significant bugs - then I don't see why you should propose to be concerned with the quality of the experience.
:-)
Just buy yourself a nice LCD - you'll probably never have the game running long enough to see the trails.
Of course, if you couple your XBOX360 (which I do intend to buy when we get to hardware v2) with a plasma TV, you'll save a ton on your heating bills this winter.
I can't use CRTs (for computer monitors, TVs I'm fine with) because of the flicker. For whatever reason, I can see some lights flickering that look steady to other people. What's worse is that those particular frequencies that I can see but others cannot give me pounding headaches in almost no time at all. For instance, there is an elevator in one of our parking garages that has a flickering flourescent light, and in the time it takes to get from floor 2 to floor 1 (about 5-10 seconds), if I don't close my eyes, I get off the elevator with a nasty headache. Perhaps CRT TVs are far enough away that it is not a problem, but most CRT computer monitors have the same effect on me, although not quite as quickly as that elevator light. If I get the refresh rate up to around 85Hz or so, I am usually ok, but at that rate, most monitors get blurry, which is almost as bad.
I got an LCD monitor a few years ago, and I wouldn't trade it for a CRT unless you paid me enough money to go out and buy a new LCD to replace the crap CRT.
Also, being in college, and moving from Texas to Chicago and back every summer for my summer job, the smaller size is an enormous advantage. My LCD has survived those years of being bumped around while moving in and out of dorm rooms, apartments, and houses, sitting in the car in the Texas heat (120 degrees in a car in the sun, easy) for a week, and no fading or burn in (like a lot of CRTs I've seen), no blurring (like a lot of other CRTs I've seen), no image distortion due to a curious kid playing with a magnet on it (I would like to claim no responsibility for that poor CRT... ahem!). In other words, my LCD still looks damn good, despite its fair share of abuse and age.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Note that almost all of those monitors play the exact same content at the exact same time? Wonder how they get multiple sources in such perfect sync?
They don't. Almost always, they have one source that is going through a splitter to multiple display devices. This has two effects:
1) It degrades the signal quality
2) Not all display devices have the same display resolution, so some won't be running at native res
The end result is that frequently a monitor/TV with BEAUTIFUL display quality will look like shit in a store because its input signal is shit. At one point Best Buy had a sale on a monitor that had decent reviews and was at a great price. My dad and I went in and saw the quality of the monitor and became hesitant to purchase the unit. We asked a salesperson if we could see the monitor connected directly to an appropriate display source, as we had noticed they were being all fed from one computer. The salesperson said that they (sadly) could not do so, but if we were not happy with the unit we could easily return it.
We decided to take the risk of having to make a second 20 minute round trip to return the thing, and bought it and took it home.
The monitor is still on my parents' desk and isn't going to get replaced any time soon, as the display quality is amazing, despite looking like shit due to a bad input signal at the store.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
We just got a quarterly bill for 70 quid -- this time last year it was over 300 -- the difference being (a) solar water heating, and (b) pointing out to the other inhabitants that a TV on standby burns a /lot/ of current just to power the LED (and similar injunctions about not overfilling kettles, not washing up every plate as soon as it's used but doing it all in one batch in the evening, and so on.
About the only easy-to-reach economising measure will be upgrading the three remaining CRT screens (TV, two monitors) to LCD... when the TV gets upgraded (presumably to a nice hi-def widescreen display), it's not going to be a plasma screen.
Note that none of this stuff is really affecting our lifestyle, and we're using a LOT less electricity. Somewhere down the line, that means less CO2 in the atmosphere.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
And the screen have not detoriated neither in image quality, luminance, color clarity and strength, in contrast or anything.
Its crt tube has not been replaced never since 1980, and it has NEVER seen any repair or needed any.
It has been in CONSTANT use for the time duration at hand, on average 4-6 hours a day.
Still no sign of weakness or anything. Its a phillips. was made in europe.
Considering that, and considering also i still have a crt monitor i bought with my 486-dx33 back in 1993, and considering it still works despite being not precise in display, i can say that it would be utter stupid to immediately jump on to the train of new plasma or lcd technology.
Id wait for the standard to settle, and only then jump in.
Read radical news here
How can this be compared to VHS versus Betamax?
Does the loser become useless shortly after the favored format is victorious?
No, it works as it is supposed to for the normal life of the unit. Signals coming into it aren't suddenly incompatible. Media isn't suddenly incompatible and hard to find.
It seems possible.
This company is SO full of crap, SO full of shit that, EVERYTHING can be expected from them.
Just look at the way the morons treat their own customers in areas of consumer electronics, mmo games (star wars galaxies), music cds (unbelievable rootkit issue).
I NEVER buy anything sony. not even if it is the last brand on earth.
Read radical news here
You should try taking your own advice.
The difference is Beta max was actually better than vhs........
I fear the Y2038 bug
The number of outdated or incorrect statements in that article are laughable. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the Toronto Sun was attempting some massive troll against plasma owners.
If you properly break-in a plasma display (100 hours), and you keep the brightness off "torch mode" (used in the showroom to draw attention, but not actually watchable), you won't get "burn-in". Plasma displays released in the past couple years by Pioneer and/or Panasonic are rated at 60,000 hours, not 40,000. Direct sunlight is a problem for *any* TV, not just plasma (duh?).
What's even funnier- the Slashdot moderators fell for this, essentially questioning the buying decision of people who just spent thousands of dollars on a new plasma TV. Nice!
1. I have yet to see an LCD greater than 42 inches which doesn't show motion artifacts while displaying sporting events. 2. LCD black level and contrast level is not as good as plasma. Two points that have a lot to do with overall image quality. I would expect LCD sales to be higher....... LCD comes in much smaller screen sizes which makes it more afordable to the average buyer. I can see more people in the market to spend $1700 or less for a smaller LCD rather than doubling that for a 50 inch plasma. I'm tired of hearing the complaint about burn-in and the life of the plasma screen. Burn-in can happen on ANY television if used imporperly and the life span of the screens have increased greatly by the plasma manufacturers, companies like Panasonic are on the 9th generation + of the technology and I believe the 40K hour quote the article gives should be more like 60k. Even if it was 40k hours, when you do the math that is ~ 14 years of watching television for 8 hours of day, 365 days a year. I'm thinking the majority of us buying either technology at this point aren't thinking these will be our main viewing sets in 14 years. At times this article is just inaccurate. As far as the rest of it goes, all it says to me is that there are different consumers with different needs, but non of it spells the end for plasma.
Maybe not in the consumer but even there, does anybody even use VHS anymore? I work with a filmfestival and offer to show filmmakers films in DVD, VHS or Beta. In the last couple of years nobody has even submitted films on VHS. Beta is the format of choice for the majority of filmmakers. It offers the best quality of these three formats. In a few years nobody will even make a VHS player but beta will still be going strong.
Who cares as long as:
1. It has HDMI 1.3
2. Can do 1920x1080 (no less is accepted)
3. It has a nice image
Why argue that [A] or [B] is better simply because of the underlying technology? For all I know, two years from now nobody will want to touch either LCD nor Plasma... Go with whatever works, your software will still play...
This http://www.digitimes.com/displays/a20060818A6025.h tml article better explains how and when plasma is getting pushed up the consumer chain.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
...that LCDs have an extremely large horizontal viewing angle, but sod-all vertically.
There you are on a flight, and the stranger next to you probably has a better view of your laptop screen than you do! Fantastic! Well done guys...
I wouldn't touch LCDs over 40". I work in retail and I hear both sides of the story. Sharp and other brands like Sony push LCDs through like mad, while Panasonic is primarily a plasma brand.
Power consumptionPlasmas and LCDs use a comparable amount of power. A 42" Panasonic plasma uses at most 350W (TH42PA60). An LCD of the same size would use about 300W at most. The difference is that the plasma only consumes 350W when it is displaying a full white picture. If it is a dark scene, it consumes less power (since the pixels are not arcing as often). LCDs consume a rather fixed rate of power since the backlight is always illuminated.
Brightness
Plasmas work by emitting light, whereas LCDs work by blocking light. Since LCDs block light, it is difficult to stop light from leaking around blocked areas. Philips' latest LCD is capable of dimming certain areas of the backlight, but the leaking is still there. Plasmas on the other hand won't get leaking. In fact, in darker scenes the detail will always prevail over an LCD.
Lifespan
Panasonic now boast that their plasmas will last 60,000 hours, which is now comparable to LCDs. Like LCDs, plasmas lose brightness over time. Panasonic's 60,000 hour figure is the length of time it takes to become half as bright. Philips, Sony, Sharp and Toshiba all boast similar figures for their LCDs and plasmas.
Price
Well, here it becomes weird. Panasonic invested a huge amount of serious dollars into a new factory which aims to pump out hundreds of thousands of plasmas each year. A 42" plasma is generally cheaper than a 42" LCD. The difference is that it is immensely expensive to create large LCDs that will not have poor constrast and brightness and remain responsive (i.e. 10ms or less). Plasmas on the other hand "prefer" to be big. It is impossible to create small plasmas because of the size of the pixel. So if the TV screen size gets bigger, the price increase from plasma to LCD will too.
My biased opinion
I work for a company which exclusively sells Fisher & Paykel, New Zealand's largest whiteware manufacturer. Until recently, F&P were Panasonic's importers in NZ, until they were big enough here to take care of themselves. They still work closely together (one of F&P's double ovens has a built in Panasonic microwave) but because of their reputation together and because of where I work, I sell more Panasonic appliances than any other brand. Panasonic's primary interest in terms of TVs is plasma, and from all the evidence that I was given from all brands saying that x was better than y, Panasonic's was the only evidence that remained consistent over the course of 3 or 4 years. It concluded for anything big (say, 42" or larger), go plasma, for anything small, go LCD.
I cannot see Plasma TVs failing. Over the last year, Panasonic's TH42PA50 plasma was the top-selling TV of any classification throughout Australia, and the top-selling 42" TV in New Zealand. The PA60 model boasts even more features for the same price.
All of the first generation plasmas were 480p only. A lot of fools bought these and think thay have HD displays when in fact they only have ED. Are there any plasmas being built today that have 720 lines?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Not in all ways - for example, VHS has a longer recording time at the fastest tape speed.
FC Closer
Look at the high-end Philips Cineos LCD TVs. You will be amazed, when comparing that to a Plasma!
My parents were friends with a Pioneer dealer, and so we got a Pioneer Elite plasma screen display, and it is without a doubt the best monitor I have ever seen. ~50 inch diagonal I would guess. Something no one has mentioned is the angle of viewing difference. A plasma screen has a full 180 degree angle of viewing, and as a result, I have many times watched a show from upstairs, looking over the balcony at the TV, since it is a true picture still. When it was new (2 years ago) it was a 16,000 dollar display, and it shows. Motion is snappy, picture is crisp, and even though we've used it for Tivo (stationary menu aspects) as well as gaming (ps2, NGC, xBox, 360) we've had no burn in issues. The logic in the screen tells the machine, if if finds a color value being stationary for too long, to weaken the power to those pixels to prevent burn in. It's a pro machine, but I would take it over anything. The viewing angle makes it much close to the experience of watching a CRT versus a rear screen projection or LCD display, that that's a big deal.
this is nothing like competing formats... blue ray and HDdvd are the next betamax/vhs.
I saw a plasma tv for sale with 60,000 hour display life. That's 7 years of CONSTANT use. We'll have 3d TVs by the time you need to replace anything... who cares if you can't get parts?
This is a TV, not some media player. If it has HDMI, then it'll last a while.
How many tv sets had so much as a composite video input when Beta was in its prime?
BetaMAX, dude, not BetaCAM. BetaMAX is a composite, based, system, just like VHS, it just tended to produced cleaner video results and better audio. BetaCAM is what you're thinking of, which is a professional grade (I still use it at the TV station where I work), componant (RGB) based video system.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Neon lights!
You find those orange lights in light switches, kettles, power sockets, power switches - they're everywhere. If recall correctly, every single neon bulb (lit all year round, 27/7) rates at anything from 0.4W to 2.5W - for almost nil functionality.
Adds up..
= Ch =
Insert
I thought HD-DVD vs Bluray was the next VHS vs. Betamax. Now Plasma vs. LCD. How about Zune vs. iPod or Myspace vs. Bebo?
The article is flat out wrong... the only fight that looks like the VHS/BETAMAX fight is Blue-Ray VS HDDVD
cheaper. you can get a 42" HD PDP for the same price as a 32" LCD. Don't worry, they use the same amount of power over one year watching "tv". they both have 60,000 hours in them, 5hr a day for 30 yrs. my 2 cents
SED (Surface-conducting Electron-emmitting Display) has the potential to beat both.
They'll have 10,000:1 (100,000:1 possible) contract ratios and 1ms responce speeds and 1/3 the power consumption as plasma..
From what I read it's pretty similar to a CRT except it has the ability to be as slim as a LCD/Plasma.
http://www.hdtvsolutions.com/sed_tvs.htm
Beta and VHS were not compatible. The situation is not at all comparable to that of televisions. If, when you bought your DVD player, or subscribed to cable or satellite, you had to get a different DVD player or a different cable or satellite box, depending on whether you had plasma or not, and movies released for non-plasma TVs would not play on plasma TVs, then the question would be non-stupid.
It is articles like this and this that have made me really question the editorial decisions and direction of Slashdot. I've had Slashdot as my homepage for more years than I can remember; today this is changing.
So long Slashdot, it's been fun. Digg is taking your spot.
Ok i really have no idea about Plasma or LCD and frankly i don't care i'm waiting for OLEDs and i can wait, my trusty CRT isn't likely to let me down before those wonderful devices arrive, both Plasma and LCD are simply stopgap measures til something truly useful arrives. and by the way it doesn't matter which is Beta and which is VHS because OLED is DVD.
the reason you're seeing more flicker, poorer off-axis viewing, etc. in RPTVs is because you're looking at the kludgey LCD, DLP, whatever RPTVs that are all the manufacturers can still offer because idiots won't buy an expensive TV unless it sounds high-tech.
... unfortunately most of the idiots buying big-screen TVs only care that they're getting a fancy-sounding "DLP" TV and not whether they're getting really good picture so the 1-chip DLP setups took over (unless you're willing to spend rap-star prices). Grrr.
I'm still using a 7 year old 46" "tabletop" 4:3 HDTV-ready RPTV with 7" CRTs because nothing under $20K today can touch it for image brightness (both on- and off-axis) with that size of an SDTV picture. I've looked at plasmas running in "torch mode" and they they are not brighter.
But you can't find those kind of RPTVs any more and it's a shame. I'd only intended to use it for 3-4 years and replace it when those wonderful 3-chip DLP TVs they were promising became prominent
Weight.
My 32" CRT died shortly after my spouse. It was huge, awkward and weighed about 160 lbs. I wanted something that I could handle on my own. My 40" LCD weighs 65 lbs and gives me 32" in 4:3.
Besides, for most things LCD or plasma are excellent, or my vision isn't good enough to notice the difference anyway :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have two CRTs (Optiquest 15" and Samsung SyncMaster 763MB) and they already blurred from their old ages. Isn't blur normal from old ages?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Also try non-native resolutions in LCDs. They look crap with them. Also, brighter colors (graphic work). I will stick with CRTs as long as I can even if they are big, heavy, and use more power. Too bad most stores only carry LCDs today.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
For what it's worth, our town (Austin, TX) has several high-end or high-volume stores where you can go see the screens first-hand and decide.
Personally, I like the latest generation Pioneer and Panasonic plasmas. The color saturation is much nicer than LCDs and almost as good as tube CRTs. Similarly the black levels are very good. I love the viewing angles, and the color and brightness stay near perfect until you are 90 degrees to the side. Some of the Samsungs and Philips are nice, but not as good as the first two. I would avoid Westinghouse and other bargain screens.
I must admit I am biased. I have owned a 50" Panasonic plasma monitor for 5 years now, and it has not failed. It uses 500 watts which was about the same as the 35" Mitsubishi tube CRT it replaced. It does show very slight burn-in from 4/3 format viewing that you can only see in monochromatic scenes that hold the screen for long times. (Casual viewers do not even see this when I point it out.) Even though the resolution is 1366x768, the conversion of 1080 material is gorgeous, much better than normal resolution DVDs. Quite silky and beautiful.
I have seen the Pioneer Elite plasma with 1920x1080 display, and it is by far the best flat screen I have seen. Panasonic has announced, but not yet delivered, a 1920x1080 plasma too.
The latest crop of LCDs are looking good. The Sharp AQUOS TVs are very nice. Although the off-axis viewing is not as good as plasmas, the colors are more saturated than any LCD I have seen. I see lots of good and bad LCDs. Some NECs I have owned did not look so colorful or hold the viewing position. This Dell 2405 LCD I use on the computer is nice. It is fast and holds the color and brightness from many viewing angles. Movies look nice, although the color is somewhat posterized compared to a CRT or a plasma.
I have friends who own rear projector TVs. They look crappy in the stores, and they look crappy in the homes. I've rarely seen one that is in nice focus or has all the colors looking sharp. Off axis viewing is a joke. Several friends have had maintenance problems with bulbs burning out or going out of focus. Definitely not a technology for me.
Front projectors are nice. There is no matching them for screen size and brightness. You do have to control your environment with fan noise and room light levels to get the best out of them.
Finally, CRTs have great color saturation. However, they can go out-of-focus over time. And I have yet to see one with 1920x1080 resolution. Even my 35" Mitsubishi was around 200 awkward pounds, so I would not buy one just for the bulk of it all. Imagine what a 60" CRT would weigh!
Well, I've rambled on about my personal experiences. If money is no object and 50 to 60 inches is your range, I implore people to see the latest plasmas and LCDs and not go on hearsay from older generations of these technologies. Both plasmas and LCDs are improving and have some of the best high def 1080p viewing to offer.
No!! I've not RTFA!!
What's going to happen is that OLED technology is finally make the needed breakthrough to get the 15 year lifespan and well see everyone move pretty quickly over to that display method as it's cheaper to manufacture then CRT/LCD/Plasma while offering bright screens with CRT Response rates. That's right, I'm looking forward to switching to an such an OLED display with CRT's refresh rates, LCD's Power Consumption and Plasma's supposed brightness.
I purchased a Plasma tv (42") and it has a 20,000 hour gaurentee against burn in...in other words, you could run the stock ticker on CNN for 20,000 hours before it would burn in, or if it did, I get a new one! Put that in your LCD and smoke it!
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
This is apples and oranges. Projectors and TVs serve different purposes, and projection TVs are a poor compromise illustrating that. You cannot watch a projector in a brightly lit room, you basically need a theater setup. Projectors can be very nice, but if you have fewer than perhaps five people watching and a small room, the LCD-Plasma competition has created excellent alternatives at a fairly low cost (great 42" HDTVs can be had for under $1.5K now).
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Yeah, computer monitors also used to have burn in issues. I remember my father bought a computer with a monochrome monitor. My mother would play her card game then leave it idle for hours. After years of that, you could still see the "cards" on the screen even when the computer was off. :-D
As far as I have seen, modern monitors don't have that problem...
If hollywood gets their actual DRM, that will be absolutely true, no matter what form it comes in. You won't be able to buy adaptors because then "pirates" could use them to circumvent the system. All old televisions would need to be thrown away.
The summary is correct. The comparison to beta/vhs is a stupid one. I can buy a plasma or LCD screen right now safe in the knowledge that whichever format "wins" my screen will continue to provide me with great service.
The only thing to be worried about right now is how long your TV will last before there is noticeable picture degradation.
I can't speak for LCDs, but I've had a plasma TV for 5 years now, and I am aware of the *potential* drawbacks.
Plasma TVs suffer from degradation in brightness over time... which also causes "burn in", which can be a problem if you always watch the same channel with a logo, or if you watch 3:4 TV with black bars down the side. my solution to that was to make sure all the 3:4 TV I watched was stretched to the sides. Not necessarily ideal, but after 5 years I have no burn-in
The other 'problem', namely the half-life of the brightness.. i've heard people say plasma TVs 'only last 3 years', which is bunk. Maybe they do if you keep the brightness control up at 100% which is where it is on display in the store, and watch TV 24h per day. I'm no TV junkie but I get a lot of use out of my plasma, and the FIRST thing I did upon settingit up was TURN THE BRIGHTNESS DOWN to an acceptable level. Even now I have it at 50% and it looks great in daylight after 5 years.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Well I just splashed out A$5150 for a Panasonic 50PV60A, 1366x768 1080p processing dual HDMI plasma display, 5 years of warranty, a Topfield HT7000S tuner, a surge protector power board, some cables - and I couldn't be happier. Now that I've run it for about 100 hours at 50% contrast/brightness (recommendation for best long term PQ is 50% for the first 1000 hours), the quality is just amazing. Sure I notice that SD broadcasts give a grainy look, but key HDTV programming such as V8 supercar racing is just awesome. With Australia getting a reasonable amount of HD programming with "free to air", I am able to enjoy the benefits of the higher resolution display already. It has an array of 80mm fans on the back, but they are whisper quiet. (Oh, except one of mine has the rattles - this is a warranty issue and I'm getting a service person to my place shortly free of charge.)
:P
What strikes me the most is that the quality of colours in some cases is just outstanding. Contrast between blacks and colours is also great, the picture just has a very solid and almost three dimensional feel to it. This is even for SD shows. As for true HD shows, that's something else - I watched two episodes of The Office (US version) last night and it was the best I've seen so far - the 1080i PQ was simply outstanding, very few compression artefacts (halo effects are noticable in a few cases). I really cannot wait for the 2nd generation HD players to come out; even though DVD playback through component is great (high bitrate ensures rich pictures with few artefacts), I know from the HD shows what I should be getting in my movies.
It is not without annoyances though. For some reason Formula 1 and MotoGP is stuck in 4:3 land, this is greatly annoying as motorsport in particular lends itself extremely well to the 16:9 aspect ratio. I guess we'll just have to wait for the Ecclestones of the world to wake up.
As for the LCD vs Plasma debate - well, just get whatever you feel will work for you, after doing some research. Do get HDMI. I know I'd have to spend a lot of money to get an LCD display of similar PQ/display size to mine, and frankly I'm quite happy with plasma. But smaller LCDs can look amazingly sharp. Anyway, I probably wouldn't recommend a SD display, as the advantages from HD are just phenomenal - that's just my way of looking at it. Also be aware that dealers _will_ try to rip you off; I saved $800 by printing pages from plasma purchasing threads and not giving in to the first dealer's arguments that those prints were an absolute joke.
ISO certified == THX certified
Boy is the Betamax analogy pointless!
The whole point of the VHS/Betamax battle was their use of incompatible media that prevented interoperability. It was a real hinderance to have a tape that you could play upstairs but not downstairs, or that you could play at your house but not your friend's house. I know some people think the wrong winner emerged (I know there were pros and cons; though it's been a while since I remembered them all), but even if so, having just one standard is way better.
Nothing like the same exclusionary principle applies to Plasma/LCD. I can perfectly well have a plasma screen upstairs and an LCD downstairs. There may be pros and cons to each type of screen, but there is no interoperability issue whatsoever. If I want to carry my existing DVD player from one TV to the other, either one equally well accepts the input signal; or likewise to hook my cable signal to either. It's true a few different signal types compete: NTSC, S-Video, DVI, etc; but the set of inputs a TV accepts have nothing to do with the display technology it uses.
It could very well prove that one technology becomes sufficiently better in almost all respects that it "wins". Personally, I still hope for OLEDs to get far enough along eventually to displace both of them. But that's just details of price, resolution, durability, brightness, etc. There's no exclusionary principle anywhere here.
Buy Text Processing in Python
That's just completely wrong. Almost all films encoded to (NTSC) DVDs are done so progressively at 23.976fps. It includes telecine flags in the headers to tell the DVD player to play it at 29.97fps interlaced (NTSC TV rate) and output duplicate fields where needed in a 3:2 pattern, so everything looks even.
So, for most DVDs, software DVD players just ignore the telecine flags, and output the progressive video as it is encoded on the DVD.
Even in PAL countries, the DVDs are encoded fully progressive, although they are speed-up to 25fps to match PAL TVs, and the DVD player interlaces it on playback for output to standard TVs.
Most CRTs can handle interlaced video modes, although use of that feature is rare.
Both standards support 1080p, Toshiba just decided to make their first players output 1080i to make them less expensive, and because few HDTVs can display 1080p anyhow.
You need to have 3:2 pulldown to get progressive video onto an interlaced screen, no matter what. It's only when you have a progressive display, and a non-progressive signal (hard telecined, actually), that you need to have a chip with the smarts to reverse the 3:2 pulldown pattern and output the original progressive picture.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
True... I wonder why some manufacturer doesn't make an LCD display with an easily replaceable backlight(*). I'd pay extra for a display if I knew I wouldn't have to throw it away in a few years.
If you're fiscally responsible enough to be willing to pay money up front to save money later, then why aren't you fiscally responsible enough to pay a repair shop a couple of hundred bucks to replace a tube instead of paying a few thousand bucks to replace a perfectly good TV?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I have a 24" CRT on my desk in front of me that will do 1080p and beyond. In fact, it'll do 2304 x 1440 at 85 Hz. Even the cheapo 17" CRT I used to have could do 1920 x 1200 quite legibly. CRTs are certainly capable of decent resolutions.
OTOH, I also have a 15.4" laptop that does 1920 x 1200. I've never seen a colour CRT with that sort of pixel density. And the IMB T221 leaves that for dead. LCDs are capable of more than CRTs, especially at larger sizes.
You're referring to televisions only, and large-screen televisions at that, but that's hardly representative of what CRTs *can* do.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You got a lot of them.
As to the technology to make the screen image move around, I first saw it on Sony plasmas 3-4 years ago. This was Sony abandoned plasma. Honestly, it sucks. If you look, you can see the image swim around.
As to black bars, they will definitely still cause burn-in. Yes, this swimming will make the edges of the burn-in fuzzy instead of sharp. But due to less use, the edges of the screen will be brighter after a few months than the center because the phosphors (are they really phosphors?) have been used less there.
A white image will not erase burn-in, but it will burn-in the whole screen a bit so you notice it less.
Plasmas are hot compared to an LCD, much more hot. This is because they use more power. Plasmas are not really any hotter than a tube, but since they are more compact (for a given screen size), the heat is concentrated and makes it seem like Plasma is hotter.
I pass a lot of plasmas in airports, and they're all very burned in. I don't know if they are using cheap panels or what.
You should look at a recent Sharp LCD. Unless you are in a pitch dark room, the LCD looks much better than any plasma. From any angle, with any image! They're fantastic. And they're available up to 65" if you're rich.
I currently own an RPLCD, so I'm more of an interested observer than a participant in any of the hang on the wall technologies. But 3 of my coworkers have bought full 1080p direct-view LCD panels lately (one a 42" for $1500!), and another bought a 1368x768 panel. I'm envious of their TVs. Some day I might have to get myself something like those.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Categorically NO IT WAS NOT!
Sorry, you can argue til the cows come home - but you do not understand: VHS was superior to Beta because you could record an entire FTA movie on a single E180 tape. Beta did not have a tape which would allow the recording of an entire movie. The reason it wasn't possible to get such a tape is because the idiots who pushed Beta did not want you to be able to tape from TV!
By the time they realised their mistake, and made 3 hour tapes available, the battle was already lost.
Simply: VHS was superior to Beta from a consumer point of view, and the rest is hostory. A "superior" product doesn't mean DICK to a consumer if it won't do what they want it to. Simple.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I have an LCD monitor at work. There's some problem with the machine, such that the screen saver *never* runs. The monitor is always on. I have burnin after less than a year of the Windows Locked/Login rectangle. I now manually move it after I lock the screen or logout. -- Andyvan
I've always wondered why devices can't use ultra-bright LED's? I'm not sure what the maximum lumens of output an LED can output is, but I've got a multi-LED flashlight that was cheaper, lasts longer on smaller batteries, and shines a whole lot brighter than most of the competing bulb-lights at the same size.
The LED's themselves are supposed to have a very long life-expentency compared to standard bulbs, likely due to the fact that they don't use a burning filiment or other hot method of producing light.
Anyone know of good LED-backlit projection units?
Actually, this is more like Trinitron vs. shadow mask technology for CRTs. For many years, Sony Trinitrons were the best CRT technology, producing a better image than the older shadow mask CRTs, But as electron beam aiming improved, shadow mask caught up and passed Trinitrons, which were more expensive to make.
Projectors have a razor blade model as you describe - sell the projector plus a $250 lamp every couple years. DLP is going to lose out in the projector market like Beta. High end DLP projectors ($25K have three DLP chips and totally kick ass. However most consumer projectors ($1-5K) have one DLP chip with a segmented color wheel (early TV technology) that causes some folks to see rainbows on bright patches (I'm one). But DLP chips have historically offered much better contrast than LCD so they have sold better. What has happened is that LCDs mans. have nearly caught up to DLPs in contrast, but don't have to pay licensing fees to TI for three DLP chips. Now you can see some fantastic Panasonic and Sanyo three chip LCD projectors that for a buck five that nearly have the same contrast as single chip DLPs but don't have rainbows (like $10K+ three chip DLPs)
Given the issues and prices of current plasma and LCD, LCOS, DLP solutions.... I think I'll wait for S.E.D. TV's to arrive before deciding. My CRT serves me for now but I could by a Sony XBR WEGA Crt and save some money to upgrade angin in 2008 when the first S.E.D.'s are due out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_El ectron-emitter_Display
-Eric
-Eric
Betamax was direct and incompatible competitor to VHS. Plasma may be direct competitor to LCD-screens but they're by no means incompatible. Even if everyone else bought a LCD, your plasma will still continue to work as well as it ever could.
:-)
Also in betamax-vs-VHS struggle, betamax was the technologically better choice. Is the author convinced that plasma is better than LCD? Trying to discredit plasma by rubberstamping it as "losing because it's better"-betamax?
I wonder how CRTs stack up against the newer technologies. Yes, a CRT will continue to work forever (my TV is >20 years old now, still works well). But I've noticed that high-resolution CRTs (like the 21" displays I use at work) degrade rather quickly.
The 2 year-old NEC FE2111 (running at 1600x1200) I'm using is noticeably fuzzier now than when it was new. Brightness is becoming uneven, too. Screens that are a few years older tend to start curving their picture (straight lines are no longer straight, especially around the edges of the display). No amount of fiddling with the settings will cure this.
A colleague used to have a 19" Dell; that display now lives in the server room because it's no longer fit for office work. It's no more than 5 years old!
I've also got an LCD (in the laptop that sits next to the CRT). At the same age, the LCD has degraded far less than the CRT. In fact, I can't see any degradation at all. It's a 14" 1024x768 panel though, so maybe it's less prone to degradation than a large display.
Since when is BetaCAM RGB based?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
BTW, when is that? I could've sworn the deadline was last December, but obviously not. Then again I did have two strokes, so my memory doesn't work so well anymore...
I've had my 42" HD plasma over a year now, and it's still kicking as much ass now as it was when i bought it.
I play tons of video games on there, no problems whatsoever. I often reboot my HTPC, forget about it, and come to find Windows MCE on the screen a few hours later. Image retention fades in seconds after changing the picture.
For me, LCD just looks ugly with standard def on a big screen. Plasma can look good no matter what you throw at it, but often it takes a good while tweaking the settings with something like DVE.
The biggest actual bug is that fatigue is apparently not in effect. EA has argued that it is actually happening and just isn't shown by the interface (they are admitting there is a bug at least), but various playtesting by fans suggests otherwise. Apparently a patch is coming.
There's also some very strange behavior where other teams will draft Hall of Famers (including dead players!), but EA says this is by design. I believe them, actually, but a lot of players justifiably see this as a major bug.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Simply design the Plasma Screens/Boxes to be flipped upside down. Really, how technically difficult would that be?
A more technical approach to solving the problem might included monitoring or sampling pixel usage over time & creating a screen saver that even's out the pixel usage over time.
... why is the LCD vs plasma "debate" so vehement? I mean really, objectively, the differences are factual and clear, and which technology is "better" just depends on what you want to use the TV for. In terms of suitability for viewing, plasmas are better if all you ever want to do with your tv is watch widescreen movies, while LCDs are a better choice if you're into gaming and other applications which use a lot of static images. Most people won't do either of these 100% of the time, so which is better is a decision based on your usage habits. Neither TV type is fatally flawed, neither type will last forever, and neither technology is perfect.
It seems that once someone has plunked down a couple grand for a big TV, it becomes a phallic symbol, much like a car or any other big visible purchase. Pointing out flaws in the purchase then becomes akin to pointing out a personal inadequacy, which makes people defensive. This is only fueled by all of these ad-hominem-by-proxy technology evangelisms, such as reviews in home theater magazines saying that the PQ of a broad type of TV will be acceptable "to an uncritical viewer" and the like. Feeling this way about an inanimate object is silly and irrational. People should buy stuff on its merits, not on how they think it will make other people feel about them.
Power Consumption: A typical 40" LCD consumes around 200W power whereas a similar plasma model consumes as you say around 350W - this is really rather significant!
Brightness: This section isn't quite right; LCDs work because a birefringent and switchable nematic layer is able to rotate the polarization state of light between a pair of crossed polarizers (which normally block all transmitted light). In the classic TN or STN geometry, the OFF state is transmitting. It is significant, and what I think you were referring to, that exactly half of the incident light from the backlight is lost because of the polarizers. The poor reproduction of darker colours by LCDs is because the Freederickz transition in the twisted nematic geometry is rather sharp - i.e. the Intensity/Voltage graph is very nonlinear. It is perfectly possible to build a display with a smoother Freederickz transition, so if this were a significant problem, manufacturers could easily eliminate it. Crosstalk between pixels, which you describe, in an LCD is only significant for very small pixels (i.e. less than a hundred microns) and hence not a signifant effect.
My bias: I'm a physicist in the Liquid Crystal Display field :-)
Thin screen.
That's it. Everything else meets or bests Plasma in other categories. Only the truly high end plasma screens top dlp or lcd as far as contrast and brightness. I've never understood why people spend the extra cash on something inherently more fallible with 0 or next to 0 gain in quality.
the consumer can't lose here like in the beta vs vhs battle. Early adopters of the beta format got screwed because they bought players and tapes that later became obsolete. It's not like your plasma tv will stop working if lcd's take over. You won't need to go out and switch to lcd. In this case, the best format will probably win, and I don't see a downside anywhere.
It is important to note that DLP is much different than Plamsa and LCD (excluding LCD projectors, which the article says "relied on bulky image-projecting equipment behind their screens") in that all DLP TVs are projection TVs. With that limitation, I imagine they will always be thicker than LCD and Plasma TVs, but probably cheaper as well.
Not true for the latest generation of Plasma TVs. Take a look at the 42" models from Panasonic.
- th42pwd8uk.php
Typical values (from zdnet reviews):
# Microdisplay rear projector: 0.11 to 0.15 watt per square inch
# LCD: 0.16 to 0.41 watt per square inch
# CRT: 0.25 to 0.40 watt per square inch
# Plasma: 0.30 to 0.39 watt per square inch
The low end of the LCD is from tiny displays.
My 42" plasma has a max power consumpition of 275 watts. http://www.dtvcity.com/panasonic-plasma/panasonic
I have read tons of reviews on this very subject. For every pro plasma article I read, I can find an opposing viewpoint for LCD.
Personally I'm hoping for OLED...
I recently bought a new TV (Proton 26" LCD), I had mulled over the purchase of a DLP or LCD. Being a Ham Radio Operator, radio interference is priority one for me. You would be amazed just how much radio interference is caused by poorly designed consumer electronics. Plasma TVs are notorious for generating enormous amounts of radio interference. My new Proton LCD TV generates no decernable interference, even the internal switching power supply is quiet.
I have heard reports from other HAMS who have problems with their neighbors plasma TVs causing broadband interference. I recently resolved severe radio interference in my area that was coming from a modified sine wave switching DC-AC power inverter and a switching mode battery charger. The DC-AC power inverter generated interference spanning 1600kHz to 56500kHz. The battery charger generated interference from 550kHz all the way to 6000kHz. The difference was like night and day, I'm so glad it's gone; because these devices certainly didn't comply with Part 15 of the FCC rules.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
When you could no longer buy movies or even blanks for the betamax, it was obsolete. Your box was junk, even if it was otherwise functional. This fight is NOTHING like that. Your LCD, plasma, or even CRT is going to work just fine until it breaks down, whatever format wins.
Asking about Blu-ray would be a more "Betamax" like comparison, since when one wins, anyone who has purched the other has a worthless device.
I think you must have to take an IQ test to become a journalist. Any score over 85 disqualifies you from the profession.
I researched CRT projection, LCD, Plasma and DLP projection for a year before finally pulling the trigger and buying DLP.
Plasma burns out. The gases simply lose the ability to hold their charge and have to be recharged which from what I've heard costs as much as a new TV. This is the expectation of the plasma TV companies: disposable TV. They expect you to buy a new TV every 3-5 years. The plasmas I've looked at were "fuzzy" when action was on the screen. A soccer or hockey game was continuously blurry.
LCD's suffer from pixel death. Granted they've improved greatly over the past year, but if I were to purchase an LCD it would have to have a zero pixel death policy.
CRT projection requires frequent adjustment to remain sharp, plus these are the largest and heaviest of these choices.
DLP is lightweight, the picture is extremely bright and sharp (I watch a LOT of hockey), and the only part that fails is the bulb. My set is over two years old and I have yet to have to replace the bulb. We use a computer on our set using the DVI input. It is rather awesome to play WoW on a 50" screen.
A newer technology that came out since I purchased my DLP is LCD projection. In the future when we look to purchase a second large screen, I'll research LCD projection to see how it compares to DLP, but due to my extreme satisfaction with DLP, I doubt it will sway me.
The only factor I do not know about that the article mentions is power consumption. I'd guess that DLP is the lowest of all of them due to the fewest components, but I'd have to look it up.
This very likely will end up like the Beta vs. VHS war. I claim that DLP projection is the superior of all of these technologies, but it appears the consumers will choose the inferior and more expensive ones.
The pixels age rapidly in their first 100 hours of being lit. But that is on a pixel-by-pixel basis. So that means you can't just be careful in the first 100 hours of using the TV or the first 3 months or something. You just flat out have to be careful, period.
Grey bars don't fix the problem. First of all, they are ugly, second, they inevitably wear out the edges of the TV MORE than the center.
Maybe an adaptive system that measures the average burn in in the pixels at the edge of the picture area and then vary the grey (slowly) bars to match that. That might do it.
Or just get a technology that isn't so subsceptible to burn-in.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I've had good luck with the NEC/Mitsubishi LCD4600 (MDT461S).
It's not as cheap as the ones you'll find in Circuit City but it'll last a hell of a lot longer. The picture's great, it's decent looking, and it's got a lot of nice features. No tuner or HDMI, but you could add that as an option.
In many areas of consumer goods, you can always find a decent alternative with a potentially better service history by looking at a commercial line instead of one geared towards home users or prosumers.
We have some standard GE refridgerators, nothing fancy, but entry level commercial units. Not a single one out of the 12 we have in this building have needed service in the 6 years we've had them.
Anecdotal evidence, but it's just something I noticed.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It is obvious from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Notice the screen edge curvature. Hasn't anyone ever noticed they're still using regular old TV tubes at the enginerring consoles?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Don't know why you can't reach their network. The link works fine for me.
I'm not sure what you mean by "linking to an individual display isn't much help." Most readers actually like seeing some concrete information instead of handwaving conjectures (oh, wait, this is slashdot...). From the specs:
37" screen
physical dimensions: 46.5" x 33.5" x 5.5"
resolution: 1920x1080
IMLED - Individually Modulated Array of LED backlights
contrast ratio: 200,000:1
As for whether or not the technology has any future, how about we let the future decide. I personally find the appearance of high-dynamic range displays to be much more compelling and substantial improvement over the state of the art than merely adding more and more pixels of resolution.
They are definitely not linear. Each pixel changes the most in its first 100 hours of being lit. But not in the first 100 hours of the display being lit.
Otherwise, you'd just turn the TV on with a black signal for 4 days and 4 hours, and be done, right?
Nope. You have to be careful the whole way. Showing a white screen for an extended period of time will dim all the pixels, so that any burn-in will be less obvious, but it won't eliminate it. You'll then have some pixels that are 100 hours old and some 200 hours old, instead of 0 and 100. So yeah, the difference will be smaller. But they'll still not be even.
If you think your plasma is really not burned in, get an all-solid color test image and put it up. I assure you will be able to see the difference between the area in the 4:3 area and the area outside that if you've ever viewed 4:3 content on it in proper aspect.
What's "just" mode. Do you mean stretch mode? Displaying content in the wrong aspect ratio just doesn't work for me. If you want to show a 4:3 image on a 16:9 screen properly, you need to have some kind of vertical bars on the side. White, grey, black, you're gonna have to pick something.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
No, LEDs don't use neon, it's time to show you a life beyond advertising lights.. Just go to Radioshack and seach for 'neon' - enlightenment may ensue. Look around you, the blighters are everywhere.
:-).
While I'm at it - I hope you don't think LEDs use no power. It's little, yes, but multiply that with how many you really don't need, and again with how many computers there are on the planet.
As for 27/7 - take your pick: a typo or accurate reflection of IT staff working hours
To go completely pedantic: if we weren't wasting such a rediculous amount of processing power on keeping Windows pretty we could use simpler systems as well that thus don't convert so much power into unwanted heat.
Insert
they wish, lcd and plasma s****. the war is between SED and OLED ;)