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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.
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.
50,000 hours at 10 hours a day is 13.7 years. I certainly don't watch 10 hours of TV a day. Probably maxes out most days around 4, meaning that the TV would last me about 34 years. Assuming something else didn't break first. 50,000 hours is quite a long time.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
They're playing down the burn in issue, "[Burn-in] is a real issue, but it actually takes much longer use than any normal person would watch a single image". Our cable provider puts a square box at the bottom of the screen with channel info in it every time you change channels. I've had my plasma about 8 years and it has the shadow of that box burnt into it.
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.
You know that 50,000 hours is over 5 years of non-stop use.
Yes, I do, but apparently I'm not your typical American consumer, who feels they have to buy something new every couple of years, even when the old one works fine.
My point being, the fact that they point out the lifespan of plasma televisions (while omitting the lifespan of other types of display) works, in a psychological sense, to scare away most consumers, who aren't going to take the time to do back-of-the-napkin calculations while standing in Best Buy; rather, they hear the phrase "limited lifespan" and subconsciously remove that product from their mental list of potential purchases.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
Many sales people are poorly informed and give out extremely inaccurate information. First of all, that number is the half-life rating (the amount of time it takes for the display to degrade to half it's original brightness). Secondly, most decent model plasma screens had a half-life rating of 60,000 hours, the exact same as what most LCD models are rated at; and most of the newer Panasonic models were rated at 100,000 hours, so they actually had a LONGER lifespan than most LCD TVs until LED backlights became the norm. For context, old CRT TVs were rated at 25,000 hours. How long have you seen some of those last?
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.
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.
I really don't understand how Betamax came to become one of the canonical examples of a superior technology brought down by a lesser competitor.
In its original form, Betamax was not appreciably superior to VHS in terms of resolution. The difference was maybe 5%-10% at most. A videophile might notice the difference, especially if he had an expensive Trinitron set, but the average viewer watching the tapes on an average TV set would not.
On the other hand, VHS was clearly superior to Betamax in one way that many consumers cared about a great deal: runtime. Remember that when home VCRs were first released, a blank cassette could cost $20 or more (and I'm not even adjusting for inflation). The earliest Betamax units could only get 1 hour out of a standard L-500 tape. In contrast, VHS started at 2 hours on the typical T-120 tape. Both formats eventually added extra modes which allowed more runtime in exchange for a slight loss of quality, and most consumers used these modes as soon as they were available. When the dust had settled, Betamax only managed to get up to 4.5 hours on the longest mode (Sony had also increased the standard tape length by 50%). VHS, in contrast, got up to 6 hours on EP mode on a standard tape.
Add to that the licensing issues (JVC licensed VHS to pretty much anyone who wanted it, while Sony was much more jealous about their format), and it's not at all surprising that VHS won. It wasn't about the marketing, it was that VHS offered a better cost/benefit ratio to the average viewer.
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.
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.
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
Meh.
You throw-away folks. Really?
I expect more from Slashdot.
When my 52" Samsung A550 LCD developed power supply issues, I took it apart and, you know, FIXED IT. Cost? Two hours and less than $5, including travel time, parts and mileage at $.52/mile.
New, comparable TV at that time? About $1,400, plus at least a couple of hours to get it set up properly and the complete pain in the ass of actually buying a TV.
Because, I mean: I'm just tripping all over myself to figure out how to burn $1,398 to get something that works just as good as the thing I had yesterday, while either fighting with local sales nazis or scheduling a time for a freight delivery.
But go ahead! Throw it away. After all, one part is broken, therefore the whole thing must be trash.
Just do the world a favor and keep it shielded from rain while you list it for free on Craigslist, instead of just leaving it on the curb or paying someone to smash it and haul it off in a packer truck.
"OMG! The headlight burnt out on my car! I need to buy a new car!"
Kid-proof tablet..