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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.
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.
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.
ORGANIC LED. Organic means it has to be fed every day and it will shit on the floor.
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
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 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.
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..