Plasma or LCD?

WeeBit asks: "I saw a news article on why you should buy Plasma instead of LCD TV's. It just sparked my interest. Flat panel TV's have the market now, and our analog TV's are on their way out. I am sure many will be thinking of purchasing their new flat panel within the next couple years. Have you given this any thought? Panasonic, has been pushing ads that sell the consumer on the plasma TV's over the LCD's. Is this a good argument, or is it just hype? Which do you prefer Plasma or LCD? Why?"

Comments

LCD

[mgabrys_sf]

Screen burn. I play console games. New plasmas attempt to mask the dammage by doing an entire screen burn - which reduces brightness. That isn't a fix.

Re:LCD

[networkBoy]

That and reflection. TFA mentions flourescent lights which is bunk, we don't have shop lights in our living rooms, but we do have windows, which can be worse. Flipside is the contrast and dMax of the blacks on plasma are hands above LCD.

In a nutshell: GP TV? LCD
Theatre? Plasma.
That's it.
-nB

Re:LCD

[datafr0g]

Nice troll. Saying that plasmas are more fragile than LCD's is like saying that automobiles are more fragile than happy meal toys. If you mean that automobiles are more complex, then you're right. If you mean that automobiles are made from cheap plastic and happy meal toys are made from tempered steel, then you're wrong.

Sorry dude, but you are full of crap. TVs, regardless of the tech they use, all have the same purpose - to display a video stream! Therefore, the comparison is legitimate. Automobiles and happy meal toys however, do not have this common use and a comparison would be redundant.

Given that you're an idiot, please let me explain.
You see, automobiles are primarily used as a form of transportation. Happy Meal Toys on the other hand, are intended to entertain children while they eat fatty foods. As you can see, both of these things have a different purpose so it would be rather difficult to compare them.

For example, it is pointless to compare:
Futurama to the Challenger Space Shuttle
Saving Private Ryan to an iMac
Tomato soup to the Latin language
Fish to skyscrapers

But we can easily compare:
LCDs to Plasmas
BMWs to Toyotas
PS3s to XBox 360s
Your brain to a wet sponge

Re:LCD

[mgabrys_sf]

Yes. Static images like score and gameplay gauges tend to burn into plasma very fast. The latest available fixes attempt to erase these burns by turning on every pixel very bright and for a long time to burn-in the whole of the screen (they call this "wear your new plasma's phosphors evenly" which is bullshit - they're basically burning down the remaining screen to match the burn). This of course lessens the life of the screen and reduces overall brightness. Basically it's a fix that breaks the whole of the screen. Unless brightness isn't important to you of course (or the lifespan of your screen), don't bother. It's the edsel of the 21st century in screen tech.

http://www.plasmasaver.com/

Re:LCD

[uradu]

> Theatre? Plasma.

Nah, projector. Cheaper and much larger picture. Not for everyone, but if you're on /. most likely yes.

Re:LCD

[Anonymous Coward]

BOOM HEADSHOT!

Re:LCD

[fyngyrz]

Nah, projector.

Absolutely agree. No box display can give you even a fraction of the quality a well-planned projection installation can. You go from getting a "that's nice" reaction to your media system to dropped jaws.

There are basically two types of projection systems. One is based on high-temperature, high density LCD panels. The other is based on Texas Instrument's DLP (Digital Light Processing) technology, which places many tiny mirrors on a chip and actually moves them to modulate brightness. Because the mirror can deflect the light entirely off screen, this results in deep, deep blacks. LCDs produce blacks by becoming as opaque as they can, but light still leaks through. Lately, compensating technology in the form of stopping down the lens to aid in darkening the overall projection range in relatively dim scenes has appeared, but this isn't really the same as a system that can actually go from very bright to deep black. Still, LCD projectors look very good, it's just that DLP looks astonishing.

And of course, you'll pay more for DLP — with the better picture, they do charge a premium and no one really has too much to say about it.

Prices seem to be settling at about $3000 for a 1080p system in the coming year; they've been about $5000 during $2006 and $10000 during 2005 for 1920 x 1080, though progressive scan is really just now appearing; 1080i was the top a couple years back.

You can shoot for 720p and really save a huge amount of money, and you still get a fabulous picture. The key here is to find the single largest surface you can dedicate to the projection system and then design around that. My sweetheart and I were looking for a place to remake, so we were looking at old stores, businesses, and so on. We found an 1940's church, and behind the pulpit was a blank wall space that was very close to 16:9 above the chair-rail; to make a long story short, we bought the church, made a home out of it, and we ended up with a display surface that is quite large. Not all projectors will focus on a large surface, so watch out for the spec that tells you how many inches they'll service, in focus. When you see 200 or 300 inches, you know you're good to go.

If you can't dedicate a wall, then a drop-down screen is just a couple of hundred bucks and you can easily get them in that price range up to 100 inches with remotes that command them to drop down.

There are downsides. The bulbs for the projector last a few thousand hours, and they dim over time. While life is advertised as 5000 hours or so, you'll probably be thinking about replacing them at closer to about half of that. And they are relatively expensive; typically several hundred dollars. On the other hand, if you put a dime in a jar for every hour you watch, you'll have "bulb money" all ready to go when the time comes. A dime an hour for the best home theater experience I can possibly have isn't too much for me; I don't use it to watch broadcast television more than a couple hours a month. We watch lots of movies and we spend a fair amount of time gaming in hi-def.

Here is a shot of my system with my sweetheart at the lower left for scale. You can see how close the wall space is to 16:9... we totally lucked out.

Re:LCD

[Technomonics]

Further advancements in DLP now replace the single bulb approach with multiple bright LED's. With this new approach, there is no "rainbow effect" and the resulting resolution is now higher than the 1080i standard.

Here is a blurb about a new model by Samsung: "Samsung must realize those DLP bulbs don't last long enough and cost too much because the new 56-inch HL-S5679W DLP set uses LED lighting. Hey, Samsung, while you're under the hood, why not kill that color wheel too? Oh wait, they did that too with red, green and blue LEDs, which is killer because there's no gold at the end of that rainbow effect. The new tweaks give the HL-S5679W a sweet seven-second startup time and 20,000 hours of little lamp lives. There's no wobulation in this 1080p set, it's full 1920 x 1080 in a progressive format with dual 1080p inputs. Samsung states these will handle 1080p signals, so if it's the real deal, these should be paired up PlayStation 3's, no? Watch for it in April around $4,200."

So, it would seem the new DLP LED would be perfect to prevent burn-in while providing a incredible picture and resolution. -kevin

Neither

[TERdON]

My old CRT TV from 1983 won't be replaced until it fails!

Re:Neither

[VernonNemitz]

I agree that neither LCD nor Plasma is enough better than the old-fashioned CRT that I would want to replace mine with one of those. The main thing against them is "pixel size"; the smallest possible pixel on a modern CRT allows it to easily and cleanly support a huge list of different screen-resolutions, while the pixels of LCD and plasma units are so much larger that they can only cleanly support a very limited list --else the image just plain looks ugly. So I'm waiting for flat-screen technology to advance to the point where pixel size has shrunk to roughly the same size that a CRT can do. So far as I know, the closest contender for that, still under development, is this one.

Re:Neither

[bytta]

Good plan!

If the (currently vaporware) SED TV ever gets out it will make plasma and LCD obsolete.

I'm cynical

[blake182]

I presume that there is some amount of "we spent all this damn money making all this capacity to manufacture plasma, so we better recover that investment as much as we can". My assumption is that between plasma and LCD, LCD is going to win. If you believe that and you manufacture both, push plasma as much as possible to cut your losses, and LCD will take care of itself.

Panasonic say: Buy Our TVs Film At 11.

[iainl]

Panasonic are the best manufacturer of Plasma displays, bar just about none. Even those painfully expensive Bang & Olufsen plasmas are Panasonic panels with upgraded processing components and a nice box.

Meanwhile, their current range of LCDs aren't that great, and are generally considered to be, if anything, worse than their previous generation (they're cheaper to make, though). They're losing market share hand over fist to Sony right now.

Exactly how unbiased do you think a press release from them extolling the virtues of Plasma are going to be? Roughly as much as the one explaining why you should buy one of their Blu-Ray players, instead of Toshiba's HD-DVD, really.

Personally, I think both technologies have their place. Plasma really comes into its own at 50" and larger sizes, where LCD's finer dot-pitch is less of an issue, and you can't even get a decent-value plasma below 42" - the rare 37" ones are ludicrously overpriced in comparison to LCD. But Panasonic are definitely over-selling Plasma in their marketing.

Re:Panasonic say: Buy Our TVs Film At 11.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Disclaimer: I work for Bang & Olufsen.

Much of the added price is the name and the nice box, which is more expensive than you might think, being that "everything is what it seems to be", ie. the metal-looking bits really are metal all the way through (mostly aluminum, seeing as they have their own very highly regarded aluminum works), the build quality is very sturdy and well-built and so on.

But the internal components are also B&O-spec and developed in house with high-grade components, and the internal testing of both assembled components and finished products is very rigorous.

The image calibration and automatic adjustments ("Adaptive Black", contrast adjustments according to ambient light, image filtering and smoothing of analog inputs on LCDs and plasmas etc.) are very nicely done as well. You really don't notice the adjustments working until you really look for it, since it's so smoothly and non-intrusively implemented. Bang & Olufsen have long been known for having some of the very best and most consistent image quality.

Also, the integration between products of various kinds is second to none. The Beo4 remote controls every single Bang & Olufsen product from the last 25 years or so, and everything including lighting and curtains can be controlled using a single remote.

So yes, you pay for the name. Bang & Olufsen being a premium "scandinavian lifestyle" type brand, it's pretty much implied that a premium will be charged. But you also pay for the quality and the integration. You admittedly won't really enjoy the integration until you have lots of Bang & Olufsen stuff, but it is possible to control products from other manufacturers, via an IR receiver and IR blaster.

Bang & Olufsen is like Apple, in a way. They have the same "It just works" mentality, and lots of people really like that, especially after having tried it themselves. More tech-savvy people may scoff at their products for being to simple and too expensive, but they are not the target market. The target market is people with enough money to spend and no interest in tweaking.

Google is your friend

[subreality]

I was going to write up a quick bit about this, but then I realized that someone probably already has. Sure enough, second hit for "Plasma vs lcd": http://www.flattvpeople.com/tutorials/lcd-vs-plasm a.asp

They've already covered what I was going to say, and more.

Bottom line: Neither is superior in all ways. Pick the things that matter to you.

CRT

[KlaymenDK]

Why not go for a CRT?

There are still solid players on the CRT market, and apart from the form factor, there is nothing they can't do as well as the modern LCD/Plasma screens.

Gone are the days of insane power needs, gone are the days of 50Hz tellies.

Yet to come are the days of SED TV and even lower power needs, and there will always be that next thing coming up real soon now (tm).

If you have a modest amount of money, you get far more quality in the form of a high-end CRT than a mid-end LCD. (If you have oodles of money, nothing of this post applies to you...)

I'm not saying boo to NEW tech; I'm just saying that it is still VERY new tech, and the curve of improvement over time is still quite steep. Spend your money how you like ... but make sure you do what's right for you, not just what's modern.

Re:CRT

[iainl]

The problem (at least here in the UK, I don't know the US that well) is that ever since LCD went huge there isn't such a thing as "high-end CRT" any more. Anything over about 24" is going to show geometry problems to some extent (dear GOD am I glad I don't have to worry about geometry or convergence now I've gone to LCD), and when you get to 32" 16/9 sets its a pretty serious issue.

Then there's the fact that the two of us nearly did ourselves serious injury taking my 32" CRT up the stairs. The 32" LCD that replaced it weighed 17kg. Including the packaging, which never made it up with the CRT, because that wouldn't have negotiated the corner.

For small sets, CRT is still unbeatable on value and image quality. But for the living room it's dead as a dead thing.

LCD

[datafr0g]

Today, Plasma sets and LCD TV's are both pretty much the same in terms of quality. The only problems with Plasmas that I see are that they weigh a ton and are more fragile than LCD's but if you're not worried about dropping one it probably wont make much difference which one you'd choose.

Personally I'd go with LCD for reasons above but also because I believe that the technology has more longevity than Plasma. LCD screens are used in just about every device with a display these days - phones, desktops, portable media players, etc. and there's a lot of it about which means the cost of common materials comes down. Plasma tech on the other hand, as far as I know, is only used in TV sets.
Go for 1080p too, if possible!

Just bought an LCD

[AlXtreme]

A few days ago I bought a new LCD TV to replace my decades-old CRT TV. Why didn't I go for Plasma?

• Screen burn - Plasmas are known to 'burn in' after a few years. This is especially the case with static images, and I want to use my TV as an additional computer screen (gaming, movies etc)
• Longetivity - This LCD should last me another 20 years. Plasmas have been known to fail in less than 5
• Power usage - I don't want to pay 50 euros/month just to have my TV on. LCDs use less energy than CRT, which use less energy than Plasma.

The only pro's for Plasmas would be the 'warmer colors' and the larger screens. But I really don't need a 1.5m screen and if I want to be warmer I'll turn up the heating.

I'm no expert, but this was what I learned after searching the net and going around to a number of TV stores.

Flat displays

[Oryn]

Any flat panel display is only as good as its video processor. Usually its kindof related to the price.

LCD displays work by running a backlight at full whack and blocking light pixel by pixel and boy can you feel it, just put your hand in front of one and feel the heat coming from it. Larger LCD displays can be quite a drain on your electricity supply as well as your wallet. LCD also tend to run higher screen resolutions than plasmas.

Without decent video processing also tend to make standard (low definition) TV look horrific and seem to make MPEG artifacts look much more noticeable.

Plasmas on the other hand tend to be of lower screen resolution and also seem to mostly have non-square pixels ie run 1024x768 but stretched to 16:9, this is important if you want to run a PC into your display. Other things I have noticed are dithering to produce some colours and also flicker (which I have never seen on an LCD screen).

That said, Plasmas seem to give a much sharper looking image than LCD (I think this may be due to a small black border round each pixel) Low def TV looks great on a plasma and there are never any viewing angle problems.
Black looks black and not gray.
Power wize even on large plasmas the power requirements average out as less than those of LCD displays.

Alot of the larger displays I have come across (mostly LCD) seem to be at some odd ball screen res 1366x768 this is a totaly stupid size because its not divisible by 8. Most graphics cards have a hard time driving a screen of this resolution.

The screen I have is of this size but only supports a PC input of 1360x768@60 so anything I throw up from my PC has 5 blury areas because it tries to scale 1360 to 1366

If you are looking to run a screen from your PC check the following:
Does the display have both DVI and DB15 Inputs (useful not essential)
Does it support its native screen res on both the DB15 and the DVI (pretty essential)
Does it support a refresh higher than 60Hz on the DB15 (pretty essential)
Does it have at least one HDMI input (most if not all cable / sat boxes need this for HDTV)

Its worth a note that 1366x768 is not a hi-def broadcast resolution and any hi-def broadcast material is going to have to be scaled through that same video scaler that does such a bad job of upscaling low-def TV.

One way to get round this problem with upscaling low def TV is to do it on your PC.
I get outstanding results using a brooktree 848 based capture card (yup thats the old style wintv card) and a linux program called tvtime (http://tvtime.sf.net). As far as I know there is something for windows called descaler. Tvtime actually seems to reduce mpeg artifacting.

The problem with using a PC is that there is no way to sync whats going out with whats coming in. If both input and output are 60Hz you will get a problem known as tairing.

Tairing (for those who don't know)
Is where the top and bottom of the picture seems to break away from each other, its mostly noticeable on side to side panning movements and the effect is like that of a postcard where someone has cut it in 2 with a knife and put the 2 bits back together, but not quite in the right place

One way to reduce this effect is to run your display at a higher refresh IE 70-80hz. Its unlikely that the DVI connector will support this so you'll have to choose the DB15 analog route. This does not get rid of the tairing, but causes it to happen in a random place with every frame (which is less noticeable to the eye)

Its also worth noting that there are some displays that are native hi-def resolution ie 1280x720 and 1920x1080. These displays will give the best results when running at these native resolutions. I live in the UK and here our HD TV is broadcast in 1080i so there is very little point in getting a 1280x720 display.

If you want to run a PC at 1920x1080 its hard to read standard 11 point fonts at 10ft distance on a 42" display (which is what we have at work)

Finally My best advice is t

Be sure to *look* at them first

[elrous0]

Well, I just made the decision to buy an HDTV myself. At first, I was going to buy a LCD. It certainly looks a lot better on paper than plasma. But then I went and actually LOOKED at them at my local Best Buy (granted, not the best place to gage them, but a lot better than nothing). I found that (to my eyes, anyway), comparably-priced plasmas looked a LOT better than their LCD counterparts. Their color and contrast was way better (more vivid and rich) than the LCD's (which looked grayish and "washed-out"). And, despite recent improvements, I could still see some annoying "ghosting" during movement on the LCD's.

So, be sure to actually look before you buy. It sure changed my mind.

-Eric

Re:LCD uses less electricity

[Ced_Ex]

On the flip side, they don't save you anything on heating if you live in a cold climate. ;)