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."

Comments

If Plasma is betamax

[LiquidCoooled]

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...

Re:If Plasma is betamax

[Bastian]

I wouldn't say that CRTs are horrifyingly large. They're just horrifyingly large if you want them to be. I'm perfectly happy with my 24" TV, and I don't think I'm the only consumer on the planet who doesn't feel the need to have his living room be commanted by some gigantic Picture Box of Doom.

The resolution doesn't bother me since it's the same as the resolution of my TV signal and I'm not going to waste any time crying in my beer because I lack the ability to represent one image pixel with four pixels of my TV's display. Yes it's true that the resolution of the TV signal I'm getting may increase beyond what my CRT does in the future, but that future date keeps moving back, the price of LCD and flat panel TV's keeps going down, and it just doesn't make much sense to me to pay a lot for something before it's useful to me when I can be patient and pay less by not buying it until I need it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "it's a pain to keep a quality image" and "difficult to maintain properly." I've had my CRT television for ten years, I haven't lifted a finger to do any maintenance on it aside from wiping the dust off the screen every so often, and as far as I can tell it is still working just fine. I don't even bother to turn off the TV when I'm going to go wander off with a videogame paused while I spend an hour and a half cooking, eating, and cleaning up after some fancy dinner. Meanwhile, the estimates for lifetime that I've been hearing for plasma displays make it sound like ten years would be a pretty good life. Not sure about LCDs.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

More like ISDN in the US

[G-Man]

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.

A lot of the article is PR/Marketing crap

[Fallen Kell]

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...

Not particularly helpful

[xigxag]

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?