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Panasonic Announces an End To Plasma TVs In March
An anonymous reader writes "You thought Halloween was for treats. Not this time. Panasonic announced to its investors today that its plasma TV business would be over by the end of March 2014." Blacker blacks and brighter whites aside, there are some good reasons for the shift.
I mean, OK, we all know that electronic devices have a truncated lifespan... but when you go to buy a plasma TV, they make a point to tell you it will only work for about 50,000 hours, after which you have to go buy a brand new one. Hence the reason all the flat panels I own (which were bought before LED TV prices started to come down) are LCD and not plasma.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
CNET's very top TVs for image quality only are Panasonic plasmas :(
everyone i know who prefers LCDs have taken to heart weird ass rumors regarding plasma (unstoppable burn in; must sit exactly 10 ft from it; everything looks cell shaded; etc.)
hope my kuro doesnt die before someone makes a proper 4k set (only going to use it for large screen computer gaming)
From the article:
It's a shame, because even though LCD tech has shown a lot of improvement, plasma displays have inherent advantages, primarily because the tech doesn't require a backlight -- unlike LCDs, which twist crystals in individual pixels to affect the light passing through, plasma pixels illuminate themselves.
And once big-screen OLED becomes cheap enough (OLED pixels, not just OLED backlit) then that advantage will dwindle away too.
I picked up a 55 inch panasonic plasma almost a year ago and I really like it. At the time it was a much better value than LCD equivalents. It's surpassed all of my expectations and I've got no complaints at all.
Even in that short year, though, LCDs have come a long way. The features are getting better, image better. 120hz is no longer an exotic premium option only for high end displays. The prices have come down too. I can see why panasonic is having trouble selling plasmas.
This is a real sham - Plasma TVs, and Panasonic ones specifically (the ST60 model lineup) are consistently the highest rated TVs out there. CNET has several article devoted to why should only buy plasma tvs and not LCD. The main reasons? Significantly better colors, no motion blur, wider view angles. I have a Panasonic TC-P60ST60 and it looks amazing. The real reason that LCD sell better? They do look better in bright rooms, though not by much. What room is the brightest of them all? Bestbuy show floors so that is where the comparison is made, not your living room.
We have a c.2003 52" Viera and love it.
The brightness is not an issue: it's on the North wall of the living room, facing a large window, and if it is "too sunny", I close the drapes. Done.
The viewing angle is amazing. Sunday night suppers are often prepared standing at the counter "just this side" of the family room, watching football.
I've stayed away from L[CE]D TVs because plasma just seemed like a better solution.
And now they will go the way of Betamax.
Silly consumers, believing hype and myth, buying poorer tech, and not saving a whole lot doing it....
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
Plasma sets put out so much RFI that it makes working HF hell if one is in your neighborhood.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
In Europe and Asia energy costs are high, so using an energy hungry TV makes little sense. Once these markets start shifting, a portion of the US market is no longer a sufficient reason to keep a manufacturing line open
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Best Buy is still a Market leader in electronics in general, but Wal-Mart and Target continue to make up a large part of this market. They have a preference for LCD. The sales staff isn't trained to talk about video quality. Plasma doesn't burn in any more, but it can have temporary retention issues. That's more than enough for retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to take the path of least resistance.
For all of it's failings as a store, including the ill-fated DIVX rental model, Circuit City was really the last national retailer that actually put effort into training the sales staff on some of the finer points of AV.
For me the issues are
1) Power consumption
2) Lifespan of the TV
3) Potential burnin issues
4) Brightness
5) Size
If you're on a budget then in terms of TCO LCD wins out and is good enough in most of the areas it trails Plasma.
For me, plasma was always a bit too expensive and power hungry.
Before getting my 55in HDTV to replace my 36in tube several things had to happen.
1. Price.. that 36 in tube set cost 1K
2. Size of display for price
3. Size of display (area it will consume in home)
4. Other factors such-as cost to run, view angle, expected life of set
Once that happened, out went the tube TV, onto the wall went the LCD/LED lit screen
Cost became less than the old 36in tube set.
Happy enough for now... sort-of
Before considering purchase my next TV there needs to be 2 important things to happen.
1. Most of all, the programming... this needs a very big change. Don't know who makes up the new shows but they trully suck!
2. Want real Holographic tv at a fair price.
I need to download the comments to this story and do a find/replace on "Plasma" and "Plasma TV" and replace it with Betamax and see how it reads.
Yet another superior technology undone by good enough.
I own DLP (~70in), Plasma (~55in), and LCD (~32in) TV's. The LCD's do better in bright rooms; that's about the only good thing I can say about them. The DLP and Plasma sets have excellent picture quality, and were much less expensive the similarly sized LCD sets.
You should restrict yourself to having only one window or tab open at a time in your browser.
At least by the metric of visual quality. Plasmas have pretty much led LCD TVs in that arena for the entire period where both technologies competed from the same screen size/price range. This includes the 2013 model year HDTVs- Panasonic's VT-series plasmas were consistently rated as the best-quality displays by most reputable reviewers. Now once you start looking at other elements, like LCDs requiring less power, not being subject to burn-in, better peak brightness, and so on, the competition becomes closer, but I would have liked to think that pure visual quality would have kept Panasonic in the market at least a while longer.
This is pretty much the end of another display technology. Panasonic and Samsung were the last two plasma manufacturers targeting the mid- to high-end display market with their own panels.
I have a 65" LG plasma and was shocked when I took it out of the box to find out how thin it really is. I was also shocked to find out that it wasn't the heavy monster they once were and it actually runs quite cool. In contract I bought a 50" LED LCD to hang in my bedroom and not only is it twice as thick but it's quite a bit heavier. The picture on my plasma is wonderful too. My only complaint with it is the glossy screen since it sometimes reflects light in the evenings.
The comment I'm replying to is the perfect example of why people are so tired of Obama-haters:
Because you can't seem to limit yourselves to talking about how much you hate his healthcare plan (or anything else about him for that matter), even when it has absolutly nothing to do with the topic at hand.
You don't like his plan: everybody everwhere in the world has heard your complaints about a million times already; give it a goddamn rest.
Just save your two minutes of hate for the next "What's wrong with HealthCare.gov?" article of which there is sure to be one every day for the next few months.
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The decline of society continues..
Okay, I read the linked yahoo news/mashable article and really, the only good reason I could find was the higher power consumption. Every single other reason listed was a consumer perception issue.
(I'd like to have a plasma TV but it's the size that excluded one. TVs ought not to be >40-inch monstrosities.)
I sold TVs for a couple years between 2006 and 2009, and I got to scrutinize a lot of screens side by side. It wasn't until LED backlights became common that LCDs could even begin to compare to the color accuracy of plasma screens. Unfortunately, customers would often come in already convinced that plasma screens had all kind of problems, some of which were extremely overblown or had been vastly improved since the early models (burn-in, lifespan); and others that were complete baloney (some salespeople at other stores had been telling customers that touching a plasma screen would ruin it). I suppose it was inevitable since Panasonic is alone on that front and LCDs are evolving much faster. If I could buy any TV I wanted today, it would still be one of Panasonic's high-end plasma models. Oh well. I still have my trusty 42 inch one and I hope to get quite a few more years out of it.
I've never seen an LCD TV that has as good a picture as my 42" Zenith plasma. I'll buy a used plasma to replace it before I buy an LCD.
Am I the only one who doesn't want brighter whites, and would even go so far as to avoid them?
On my smartphone, computer monitors, laptops, and even my old CRT monitors and TV I keep the brightness turned down. When I have opportunity to see LED TVs at my parent's place or elsewhere they always seem eye-piercingly bright, to the point where I don't care to watch them. The same goes for any LED based TV in a store -- or basically anywhere. This was one of the main reasons I was looking forward to eventually purchasing a plasma TV (instead of an LED TV) to replace my CRT TV.
Truer whites I'm all for, but brighter whites do nothing at all for me.
Cyrano de Maniac
Watched a American football game at my Mothers house on her new LCD display. Was like looking at a cartoon. All the colors were way over saturated. During half time I checked the setting. Everything was on the default show room settings. Max out everything.
I set the set into "movie" mode. Used some test images. Did a eye ball test of the RGB gamma settings.
Second half, world of differences. Grass looked like grass, uniforms no longer look like dayglow, flesh tones normal.
Was told that I had to set it back. The colors were washed out and dull. They hated the improved image.
Note! In a previous job I was involved in developing image compression codecs. So I spent 100's of hours doing AB comparisons of images. Oh and I own a plasma display for my home viewing. And we used CRT's at work for image evaluation. LCD just cannot produce the same quality images "yet"
Personally, I think plasmas look better in the dark and LEDs look better once any amount of room lighting is added. I think a lot of people do most of their watching with some lighting on.
Disclaimer: I own a top of the line 54" Panasonic plasma set from a couple years ago and enjoy its excellent picture quality.
If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store and head over to the TV section, what immediately hits you is the brightness of most of the LCD sets and the comparatively subdued brightness coming from any (remaining) plasma sets still on the floor. In the unscientific forced side-by-side comparison environment of a brightly lit store, the LCD panels just show better.
It's the same reason that many folks think they'll prefer shiny laptop screens or speakers that deliver booming lows and super highs. It all seems better in a snap judgment... It's not until you take it home and have to live with it for a few hours that you start to realize that matte screens are easier on the eyes, speakers with more natural frequency response are easier on the ears and that LCD TVs (usually demoed in torch mode) need to be turned down to a more tolerable brightness level (well within the realm of what a plasma can do) during extended viewing sessions.
A lot fighting game fanatics swear by the Plasmas for big screen displays. The input lag on a quality Panasonic is 16ms, whereas the lag on a quality LCD is 30-40ms (substantially worse on the cheap brands).
The power consumed by these monsters is ridiculous and, give the recent price rises in electricity (100% in Australia), it doesn't surprise me that no one wants to buy them.
Almost everyone who bought one of the early sets had to go back and buy an air conditioner to keep the room cool as well.
Because that's when this story first made the rounds. It was first mentioned on 8 October in the highly-regarded AVS Forums http://www.avsforum.com/t/1494093/panasonic-to-end-plasma-panel-production-by-april-2014
So tired of getting stale "news" here lately. If /. went dark tomorrow I think I'd miss it less than I'm going to miss Panny plasmas.
See, to me, DLP has this rainbow effect on the colors, with the outer edges looking on the fuzzy side.
Plasmas were my last best hope--but when I went browsing online some months back, I couldn't find any dedicated PC monitors for sale and didn't want to pay for a TV.... -and couldn't find much of any high-quality CRTs either. Is there any PC screens (for desktop use) that don't have the LCD viewing angle issue?
{-that being, that the image at the top edge is never the same color as the image at the bottom edge-}
A few years ago I "upgraded" my CRT Viewsonic monitors to new-fangled fancy widescreen LCDs. The wide-screen part is nice, but I've come to realize that the LCD part sucks.
The marketing spin has been incredible, specifically over the last 5 years against plasma, somehow the entire "LED vs LCD" thing managed to paint the LED lit panels as the definitive display technology (those of us who understand colour depth, contrast, banding and just plain old "moving nicely" / refresh rate know this is simply not the case)
I managed to pick up earlier this year the second best display in the 2012 / 2013 (ST50) series, 65" - I love the thing, apparently the last Panasonic the ST60 has display lag, bad for gamers- however that could be unfounded and surprising for a plasma.
So for those of us that detest LCD screens (and that's mostly the plasma buyers and video enthusiasts) - we all best hope the OLEDs take off. I finally did some actual research for about 8 hours a few months back to get a better understanding of OLED and yeah ok, I finally get it. We've got a plasma and CRT killer here, finally (LCD and LED were never in the running) the blacks are incredible, the colour range is apparently larger / wider than what the high end digital video cameras can even capture for film, the refresh rate is in the tens or hundreds of thousands of times per second (?!) it's also the thinnest and it uses little power. Viewing angles astonomical, Burn in is a potential issue (slowly getting better) and overall display life is also a potential issue (again, slowly getting better)
We finally have one available to actually buy, in TV form (55" OLED in Korea is now on sale, a measly $10,000) - but considering it's a new tech, I'm actually surprised it's that cheap. ... around 5 years, we'll see 70 / 80 / 90 / 100" OLED displays for about 2 to 6k$ - same old premium price for the big HDTV boys budget who can afford a new toy.
My guess is that in
I do hope to see them on PC desks eventually too. LCD / LED movement is horribly grainy and nasty, I just can't deal with it.
(One more thing, I'd heard Panasonic was doing a joint research lab with someone to move to OLED? So perhaps their days as a premium display manufacturer are not over)
Either way, hope my Panasonic doesn't die for at least 3 or 4 years.
One problem with plasma televisions is that manufacturers started switching to short-decay phosphors a few years ago. While that helps prevent trailing ghosts when you have high-contrast objects moving across the screen, it also makes the low 60Hz refresh much more noticeable. It is like viewing an old SVGA monitor from the early '90s.
In countries with 50Hz mains, you can easily find 100Hz "double scan" models that completely alleviate the issue, running all content at 100Hz. But in North America, the closest we have are some 120Hz 3D models that have the undocumented feature of accepting 1080p120 inputs over HDMI. But as soon as you switch back to the integrated tuner, you're back to 60Hz.
I would love to upgrade my old 42" plasma to a newer, larger plasma screen, but I can't because the glare from the newer screens give me a headache after 20 minutes.
It would be foolish to hate him because of the ACA at all. The ignorant conservatives need to get it through their thick heads that this is the Conservative pro-business plan. The Liberals want single-payer like civilized countries. If the Republicans keep acting crazy, we have no choice but to marginalize them, and they'll have no input in policy at all.
The article claims burn-in was solved. Horseshit. Look at any plasma screen that has been hooked up to a game console, and check all over the corners and top and bottom of the screen when the picture is black.
My Mitsubishi 73" DLP was a steal a few years ago. I paid $1400 when similar LCDs were well over 2 grand.
The Decline of Japanese Consumer Electronics Continues...
As a consumer I'm fine with that - I just bought a great new plasma TV form a Korean manufacturer. As long as someone, somewhere, keeps pushing the state of the art. Longterm though I think Japan has deeper issues, with its ongoing demographic implosion (and the same thing would be happening in the US without immigration).
More on-topic: plasma is great, and remains great, if you're not shopping for the cheapest model line. Great color accuracy (not just the great blacks), no problems off-angle, and no problems with fast motion. I've yet to see an LCD as good at a similar price-point.
Still, OLED is the future (combines the picture quality of plasma with the lower power and weight of LCD), and has finally made it to top-end TVs as a consumer product. Absurdly expensive, but everything starts that way. (OLED was "the cool new technology sure to be in TVs soon" when Slashdot was new). Give it another 5 years, and merely "expensive" TVs should be OLED.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
iSupply continues to only give CRTs another 3 years until complete extinction, just as they predicted in 2006. No doubt it will be true someday. But the CRTs are built like battleships, and remanufactured for markets that have lots of heat (bad for OLED and Plasma, I'm told). http://www.isuppli.com/Display-Materials-and-Systems/MarketWatch/Pages/Global-Television-Shipments-to-Shrink-in-2012.aspx Samsung and LG are the remaining players in the Plasma (PDP) manufacturing market. Will they outlive Videocon/Thompson (CRT maker in India)?
Gently reply
When I went to buy my first flat screen TV 6 months ago with a $1000 budget I took my time, read a lot of reviews and made a lot of trips to stores to see the models in person.
At first I was aiming for LCD - there was a Samsung Series 6 LCD, 40" for $1000. But in seeing the "cheaper" LCDs without the full motion control they are frustrating to watch. Everything is too sharp, the movements on the TV don't look real - it's like the thing with humanoid robots standing out hugely to us as the get near human appearance.
All of the LCDs in this price range are like this - even a lot of the more expensive models appear the same to me. (I'm a fan of Samsung) The only Samsungs to not have this were the Series 8 and 9 which were ridiculously out of my price range.
So instead I had a look at Plasma Screens and am very happy with my Samsung Series 6 51" Plasma for $700. The colours are great and feels more "alive", none of the over sharp picture but still looks 100% watching 1080 and such and (not that I use any of it) has all the 3D, Smart TV BS.
Suffice to say low end Plasmas (from actual manufacturers) will give a better TV experience than a similar priced LCD and you'll probably get to upgrade to a larger size and get more features.
I paid $1050 for my 73 inch in 2009? I'm on my third bulb ($99 direct from Mitsubishi and takes 5 minute to swap). First bulb lasted 8000 and the second was about 5000. There is over 14000 hours on it total. Just like the plasma haters, there are even more DLP haters. Some reasons are valid like the rainbow effect that some people notice and although the viewing angle is no where near a plasma or an LCD, they aren't that bad. Room size matters. Mine is in a 20x18 room in the corner and you get great picture from almost anywhere in the room except when you are "under it".
I also have a 50in LG and a 50 in Panasonic plasma and Visio 47 LCD so I am no stranger to the other technologies and each has its place.
None have died. Admittedly, they are all Panasonics. My very first one is still being used by my father in law. That TV is now over 10 years old. It still looks better than most LCDs for sale today
No love for DLPs? I almost cried when my 8 year old 61" Samsung died a few months ago. It delivered a sharp, bright picture and movies on it were theater quality. My son knew I couldn't afford to buy another TV so he gave me his one year old 55" Samsung 3D LCD TV (He's such a good boy). He had seen the reviews and wanted to buy a Panasonic plasma. Now I know why he wanted to get rid of the LCD. Everything has a whitish blur to it. Movies looked like a 70s soap opera. It took weeks of searching to find out how to turn movie mode on. After that all the individual brightness, contrast, etc settings have to be tweaked but the white blur is still noticeable.
Free is good but I just wish I had thought to buy a new light engine for the DLP and put it in storage while they still made them.
Whatever happened to SED, that technology that was similar to a CRT except that each pixel gets its own electron gun? Seems like the tech combines the good things about CRTs with the good things about flat screen displays.
It took weeks of searching to find out how to turn movie mode on.
Really, weeks? I hope this is massive exaggeration.
It's clear to me that plasmas give better quality image but I still choose LCD. The plasma issue of burn-in is the main worry but they're also more power hungry and heavy too. Plasmas easily beat LCDs for black levels, colour accuracy, response time and viewing angles but LCDs are good enough. Even if my kids didn't spend hours playing video games I know somehow there would be burn-in and then I'd want to buy a new set ... which is just a waste. Plasma being the losing technology is not all down to marketing.
I know that OLED and LCD technology in general has improved but there's something fantastic that shines from a plasma screen which LCDs don't. The only problem is that every 3 or 4 years you have to pay about $150 for repairs because something blew out on it. Not a big deal IMO but make sure you don't leave the tv on a news channel when you forget the TV on because you'll come back with watermarks. Speaking of which, why do tv channels embed watermarks permanently? I hate that, it's terrible for ghosting. Thank god I'm no longer subscribed to cable hahaha Anywhoo, I did move on to a really good LCD but it doesn't feel as awesome has saying you have something that is full of plasma. No, don't get started with blood. haha
I really don't see where you're coming from. I don't see any posts that involve obama or obamacare? While you are certainly the minority in support of him, that doesn't mean that you have a right to hijack a thread with silly nonsense. Please stick to the topic of plasma tv's, ktnxbye
There is absolutely no comparison, on my LCD colours look artificial and 'hopped up' after watching the exact same video on my Plasma. I know network and cable streams suck, but I have my own HTPC, with over 8000 films, and there's a huge difference.
Especially on black and white films, and especially with higher resolution video, a-la Blu-ray.
I'm sad that Panasonic (the maker of the best plasmas) has decided to get out of the business, but hopefully in ten or more years, when It's time for me to look for a new screen, OLED will finally be up to todays plasma technology.
The naysayers simply haven't done their homework. Read any review, consumer level or Professional, and plasmas always have a better picture in every way then anything else.
Their only failings are slightly higher power consumption, not quite as bright, and highly reflective screens. Lifespan? meh, 100,000 hours to 'half-life' and as others have said, old cathode ray tubes were rated 25,000 hours.
Tis a sad day, but I knew it was coming, from insiders in the business.
jaz
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. No-one sees motorcycles
What happened with Reagan wasn't fatigue but Altzheimers.
This is why.
I just (as in: 3 weeks ago) brought home a Panasonic TCP55VT60 plasma. I knew which model I was purcasing long before I walked into the store, but for giggles (and yes, this could be classified as me being a prick, but it was interesting), I walked into the Best Buy, was accosted by a salesman, and said simply that I was interested in a 55" TV that had terrific color rendition. He showed me every TV they had in 55" EXCEPT the plasma. When I asked about the TV we skipped over, he said (I roughly quote) "Nah, that's a Plasma. They are heavy, run hot, and the screens burn in after a few years, and they're just not as bright or as good." When asked why they have one, the answer: "Well, some people still like them, but everyone else has moved on", implying I'd be an idiot for even looking at it.
I realize that was just one salesman at one store, but it's that exact mindset that killed it. It's not price competitive, they are hot, and they do show like crap in the store. The 65VT60 they had in the store was set in Normal mode, and I noticed that more than a few of the LCD's were set to either Vivid or Showroom modes, really blasting the color out. Nevermind that the VT50's and 60's (and the ZT's, which are even a little better) are beating the very best of the Pioneer Kuro sets, long regarded as *the* gold standard in TV's, and getting them to display to 90% of their potential is a single setting away, no professional calibration or screwing around needed.
It's a unfortunate time for the few of us who give a shit about colour accuracy and black levels. I hope the OLED's are able to cover the gap pretty soon.
Oh, and I told Best Buy to fuck itself and bought the TV from a local chain for less, and with a salesman who wasn't a complete dipshit. And, as a completely unsolicited review, if you're considering one....yes, they are that good. In a brightly lit room, they're ok. In a dark room, they're jaw-dropping good.
Chris Knight is my hero.
And in the future, we will no longer be able to see all these terrible things that Obama is doing on new Panasonic plasma TVs!
Uh, no. This was passed by the House and Senate. Romney's input was that this was great for MA but what's good for one state isn't necessarily tailored to the economic needs of another state.
We could not have integrated a single-payer system into this country in one sweeping move. It would cause severe economic destruction. To go that way, we need a long-term plan that doesn't collapse the job market by marginalizing the insurance companies all at once. It's not as simple as you push a button and all these magical things happen with no consequence.
Of course you see that with the ACA too. Push a button and magically everyone has to pay fines or pay expensive healthcare, some of them get a discount, but many people are too poor for this shit and get no subsidy. Meanwhile for $200/mo you can get a HDHP that covers nothing, not even wellness coverage, and lets you get an HSA; it's cheaper to put the $3500 in the bank every year and pay the taxes than to pay to manage your own healthcare this way, except you'd pay a $700 fine plus $1000 in taxes and the HDHP costs $2400 ($1700 is still cheaper). Regular old health insurance now costs like five times what I used to pay for the same shit: I've seen coverage I spent $350/mo on go for $900-$1200 depending on who you ask.
Nothing happens in a bubble.
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Seeing as Panasonic plasmas are far superior to the brand you bought's plasmas in both image quality and build quality, and said brand you bought's plasmas are the most provenly unreliable big-brand televisions on the market, I think you have nothing to feel smug about.