Are Plasma TVs the Next BetaMax?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Aug 20, 2006 12:00 PM
from the sure-why-not dept.
from the sure-why-not dept.
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."
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Laser TV — the Death of Plasma? 351 comments
spoco2 writes, "As reported in major news outlets yesterday in Australia (The Age, the Herald Sun), a new television technology has been developed which is touted (by the developers) as far and away superior to both plasma and LCD. From The Age: 'With a worldwide launch date scheduled for Christmas 2007, under recognisable brands like Mitsubishi and Samsung, Novalux chief executive Jean-Michel Pelaprat is so bold as to predict the death of plasma. "If you look at any screen today, the color content is roughly about 30-35 per cent of what the eye can see," he said. "But for the very first time with a laser TV we'll be able to see 90 per cent of what the eye can see. All of a sudden what you see is a lifelike image on display."' The developing company, Arasor International, is said to be listing on the Australian stock exchange shortly."
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Technology: New Larger TVs Favor LCD Over Plasma 211 comments
Information Week is carrying a Reuters story examining the shift towards LCD technology in recent large-screen television models. Though some analysts acknowledge that plasma displays have faster response times over large surfaces, the industry seems to be betting that consumers will prefer higher resolution images over time. From the article: "CPT's Wu agrees that plasma panels, especially 50-inch and larger ones, do excel LCDs in some aspects of picture quality, but he says the sheer size of the LCD camp will help LCD panels overcome whatever drawbacks they have in a timely manner ...With the 40-inch-class market gradually taken over by LCD TVs, plasma models need to migrate to the market for 50-inch TVs and above, but demand is not as well developed there, analysts say. 'The United States accounts for more than 70 percent of demand for 50-inch plasma TVs and larger. In other words, there is virtually no 50-inch-class plasma TV market outside the United States,' DisplaySearch director Hisakazu Torii said."
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LCD backlights will fade unevenly (Score:5, Informative)
Since so many of these are new, they won't fade for about two years - if Plasma is still around, you may see the tide change....
That's a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:LCD backlights will fade unevenly (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a Sony CRT-based HDTV, and I really would love a flat-panel big screen. I think right now I'd favor LCD, but that preference is partly based on hearsay about Plasma (supposedly high power and supposedly short life), not direct experience.
I have had direct experience with LCD, and I love it - except for the uneven fading of the CCFL backlights (maybe LED would improve this?), and the poor image quality when viewing non-native resolutions (which is improving with newer technology, and is mainly a problem only with PCs or SDTV).
I haven't really warmed up to DLP - poor off-angle viewing and relatively dim image - but I can see the economy in it.
So, I'm torn - each have strengths and weaknesses, but I'd hate to see one drop out simply because some information wasn't brought up.
I imagine if people knew that Betamax was capable of better image quality without breaking backward-compatibiltiy, it might have trumped VHS (okay, there was also the closed-source problem, and the legendary porn industry influence).
Re:LCD backlights will fade unevenly (Score:5, Insightful)
I exactly the opposite: I don't buy until things clear up.
I would love to buy, even if it was expensive, a nice solution for viewing movies from my computer, but there seems to be no clear choice right now. Until then, I'll stick to my (ultra high definition, if compared to any TV) 19"CRT monitor, which is not bad since I view from a close distance, on a comfortable coach.
Which other system would allow me to play 1920 pixels wide movies, like this? http://orange.blender.org/download [blender.org]
Re:LCD backlights will fade unevenly (Score:5, Informative)
Re:LCD backlights will fade unevenly (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that I'll just buy a new projector than replace the bulb - an equivalent new projector would only cost 50% more than the bulb itself.
Re:Fade? (Score:5, Insightful)
Several LCD panels I have programmed claimed 2.5 years of interruptible function w/o degradation of quality. Since the panels were insanely cheap I presume that better panels live even longer.
Presuming one watches TV on average 6 hours a day - with 2.5 years guaranty - that would make 10 years of lifetime. 10 years later I'm sure it would be possible to replace cheaply the panel with new one - just like it is happening now with CRTs.
CRTs are also prone to degradation - just like plasma and LCD. It's just the quality of CRT sucks (HD LCD/Plasma really provide better viewing experience) so nobody watches them too much. (After coming to IT, I barely can look at CRT TV at all: 50Hz just hurt my eyes too much.)
P.S. And with new developments like LED (light emitting diodes) back light - that would move the problem even further.
If Plasma is betamax (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:5, Informative)
WTF are you talking about? If you don't know, don't post. And moderators, don't fall for something that just *sounds* informative.
CRTs offer *far* better resolution at the present time than LCDs, plasmas, LCoS, DLP, and every other non-military display technology. It's better by a factor of 3 to 5, at each point of the market scale.
The other parts of your post are fairly reasonable, and CRTs will almost certainly go the way of the dodo before long. However, *RESOLUTION* is *NOT* one of their weaknesses. It's pretty much their greatest advantage against other technologies, with their next-best advantage being high contrast ratio.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Awful Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they're slightly cool looking, they save space and they're lighter, but I've seen more than one person shake their head sceptically when they've seen the picture quality and then looked at those 'HD Ready' logos slapped all over them. Quite frankly, I think both of them are Betamax, but I think a Betamax versus VHS comparison is wrong. They're both crap.
Video Games (Score:5, Informative)
But you can keep using your plasma (Score:5, Insightful)
More like ISDN in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of the article is PR/Marketing crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:A lot of the article is PR/Marketing crap (Score:5, Insightful)
That argument would make sense if Sony never made or couldn't make plasmas. It makes much more sense to say that Sony doesn't make plasmas because they don't believe in them.
"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."
Of course not. You wouldn't trash your own products even if they were trash.
"They will give you more straight up answers as to which one to use for your situation. Not this kind of PR sh---..."
No they won't. It's all "PR sh---".
It doesn't matter how a set is made. It only matters how it performs.
Yep, burn in dooms plasma (Score:5, Insightful)
DLP, LCD projection and CRT (projection or direct) aren't really competing for the same niche because they aren't thin panels. CRT also has the 4:3 burn-in issue.
Neither's good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
The way I see it, they're both stopgap technologies that are persuading impatient people to part with their cash until they can iron the creases out of SED or OLED technology and get them production-ready.
Not particularly helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Wrong, Entrenched Ideas on Technology (Score:5, Informative)
As a writer of an article, one should do more than research the televisions of one company and base all aspects of technology on it. That company, would be Sony as indicated by the author of this article as it is the only manufacturer that is being represented.
This article is filled with entrenched ideas of plasma technology from about half a decade ago, when LCD televisions were prohibitively expensive and small.
It does not need to be restated that this article has no resemblence to the Beta vs. VHS wars as all televisions will continue to be able to display a standard picture, but here are the wrong ideas being perpetrated by this author.
Plasma's burn-in has been eliminated due to algorithms developed by both Samsung and Panasonic to essentially shift on-screen images ever so slightly to avoid a single image to stay in one place. In fact, even if you blasted a pure white image on the screen to purpose for a day (a standard accident, perhaps?) then the technology can even cure that over a day period of standard use.
Black bars will not cause burn-in on today's plasma televisions. Television station logos that sit non-stop in the bottom-right corner are the only culprits. Even most stations have figured out to shift the logo a bit or make it transparent enough that the older plasma television crowd will not have burn-ins.
Sony abandoned its plasma television technology because it just couldn't win. Sony was using glass from another manufacturer, which is a very expensive part. Consumer Reports and CNet routinely choose Panasonic plasmas as the very best because they manufacture the key plasma television components. Likewise, the article states that Sony abandoned it in favor of LCD technology. Sony also abandoned the tube television technology which was a cornerstone of the company's name. One would imagine a specialist, nay a leader, in tube television technology would have been most adept at establishing plasma technology.
Plasma televisions are not hot. Hovering one's hand above the vents of plasma televisions today reveal no more heat than a standard television, except suspiciously on brands such as Sony or Akai. Go through a Best Buy and feel the lack of heat emanating from a Pioneer, LG, Samsung, or Panasonic. In fact, Samsung did use to have fans to cool its plasma, but over time it has been eliminated.
Now for some editorializing... I pass by three plasma televisions every day in a work environment. A Samsung plasma hangs suspended from a ceiling displaying a static computer display giving graphical and textual read-outs. The display never changes interface except a screensaver comes up every thirty minutes. It does not have burn-in when somebody gets caught surfing the web on it by accident (I always find that one funny). A Sony plasma hangs in the boardroom, it is hardly on except for a teleconference, and it works day in and day out with just a face on it most of the time. A Panasonic plasma plays video non-stop in the breakroom and is only turned off at night. That display is smaller than the rest at 42 inches, but it is phenomenal color-wise and it hasn't failed either. Plasma technology is not terrible. It's very good. LCDs do not offer lighter weight or thinner enclosures than plasma (so far). LCD panel televisions will defeat plasma in the situation where it becomes thinner, lighter, larger, and more beautiful displaying images (this encompasses the entire image quality and motion playback attributes) in a fast enough time with a matching price to plasma on size. The problem is that plasma if you look online is far cheaper than an equivalent LCD panel television. Retail chains are making a load of money off of plasma units in-store. LCD television technology is priced exactly as it is worth in both on and off-line venues.
I'm just glad the author of the article didn't compare this to the Wii vs. Playstation 3 war or the Zune vs. iPod war.
LCD VS PLASMA VS CRT (Score:5, Funny)
Being a scrawny nerd with no muscle tone makes moving CRT's a problem. It's primary reason I dumped my nice 19 inch CRT monitor for an LCD.
Plasmas vs LCDs, I'm rooting for Plasma (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't touch LCDs over 40". I work in retail and I hear both sides of the story. Sharp and other brands like Sony push LCDs through like mad, while Panasonic is primarily a plasma brand.
Power consumptionPlasmas and LCDs use a comparable amount of power. A 42" Panasonic plasma uses at most 350W (TH42PA60). An LCD of the same size would use about 300W at most. The difference is that the plasma only consumes 350W when it is displaying a full white picture. If it is a dark scene, it consumes less power (since the pixels are not arcing as often). LCDs consume a rather fixed rate of power since the backlight is always illuminated.
Brightness
Plasmas work by emitting light, whereas LCDs work by blocking light. Since LCDs block light, it is difficult to stop light from leaking around blocked areas. Philips' latest LCD is capable of dimming certain areas of the backlight, but the leaking is still there. Plasmas on the other hand won't get leaking. In fact, in darker scenes the detail will always prevail over an LCD.
Lifespan
Panasonic now boast that their plasmas will last 60,000 hours, which is now comparable to LCDs. Like LCDs, plasmas lose brightness over time. Panasonic's 60,000 hour figure is the length of time it takes to become half as bright. Philips, Sony, Sharp and Toshiba all boast similar figures for their LCDs and plasmas.
Price
Well, here it becomes weird. Panasonic invested a huge amount of serious dollars into a new factory which aims to pump out hundreds of thousands of plasmas each year. A 42" plasma is generally cheaper than a 42" LCD. The difference is that it is immensely expensive to create large LCDs that will not have poor constrast and brightness and remain responsive (i.e. 10ms or less). Plasmas on the other hand "prefer" to be big. It is impossible to create small plasmas because of the size of the pixel. So if the TV screen size gets bigger, the price increase from plasma to LCD will too.
My biased opinion
I work for a company which exclusively sells Fisher & Paykel, New Zealand's largest whiteware manufacturer. Until recently, F&P were Panasonic's importers in NZ, until they were big enough here to take care of themselves. They still work closely together (one of F&P's double ovens has a built in Panasonic microwave) but because of their reputation together and because of where I work, I sell more Panasonic appliances than any other brand. Panasonic's primary interest in terms of TVs is plasma, and from all the evidence that I was given from all brands saying that x was better than y, Panasonic's was the only evidence that remained consistent over the course of 3 or 4 years. It concluded for anything big (say, 42" or larger), go plasma, for anything small, go LCD.
I cannot see Plasma TVs failing. Over the last year, Panasonic's TH42PA50 plasma was the top-selling TV of any classification throughout Australia, and the top-selling 42" TV in New Zealand. The PA60 model boasts even more features for the same price.
Re:I bought a Rear Projection TV (Score:5, Informative)
Why?
1. Rear projection CRT may look the best, but they are way too bulky for the space. I wanted a sleeker TV, not a bigger one than my old standard CRT.
2. My wife sees the rainbows on DLPs. It's less obvious with higher-priced models (where the color wheel spins faster), but it renders them unwatchable for fast content (like sports or action movies) for her.
3. Plasma versus LCD came down not to their performance with hi-def content, but with their performance with standard content. I've had my plasma TV for more than a year, and most stations I watch are still standard def. In my opinion, standard def TV looks better with plasma than with LCD. I looked at lots and lots of TVs, and I switched them in the stores to standard def broadcasts instead of leaving them on the hi-def channel the retailer wanted to show. Of course standard def content looks worse on a big-screen TV than on a small TV, but the static and artifact pixels were far more visible with LCD than with plasma.
This whole discussion is silly, anyway. Both types of TVs can play the same content, as can rear-projection TVs, DLPs, and even those polymer TVs in the Slashdot article yesterday. There's no reason they cannot all co-exist in the marketplace. As long as there are people like me who dislike LCDs, there will be a market for them. (I don't even use LCD computer monitors - CRTs still look so much better it's unbearable.)
Re:I predict.... neither. (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny you should say that... Samsung finally shipped their LED-based DLP a few weeks ago.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/06/samsung-hl-s56
I don't know if they have removed the fan altogether, but they have removed the color wheel (one less thing spinning at 10k+ RPM...) and the LEDs generate a LOT less heat than the traditional bulb, so I'd imagine it's effectively silent.
Going a bit off topic (well, not really, we're talking TVs!) Sony was showing off a prototype SXRD (ie LCoS) TV at CES 2006 that was about a foot deep (they had it hanging on a wall). Combine these innovations in projection TVs (true 1080p DMD/LCoS chips, LED lamps, thin cabinets, etc) and amazingly they may start taking some of the plasma/LCD market segment, ie low footprint HDTVs - especially in the 50"+ range, where there is a huge price advantage for projection TVs.