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Television Media Hardware Technology

Technology Behind Plasma Displays 137

Posted by Zonk from the look-at-all-the-colors dept.
digg writes "CoolTechZone.com has an in-depth article that gives an overview of how Plasma Displays work. From the article: 'So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity. Plasma can be produced if a gas is energized enough to split the molecules into positive and negatively charged ions. Mostly, the plasma displays use a mixture of noble gases like Neon and Xenon."
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Technology Behind Plasma Displays More

Technology Behind Plasma Displays

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  • Obligitory Wikipedia Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Xandu ( 99419 ) * <matt@@@truch...net> on Sunday August 28, 2005 @11:50AM (#13421234) Homepage Journal
    Of course, you can get all this (and more) at Wikipedia's [wikipedia.org] Plasma Display page [wikipedia.org].

    [I realize this is probably karma whoring, but I hate it when there's only one link in summary and it doesn't even have much info, and is littered with ads, and you have to look at 3 pages to get the whole article. That and run on sentences.] ;-)

  • Amateurish (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mapultoid ( 72791 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @11:50AM (#13421236) Homepage
    I hate to be totally pedantic (mildly pedantic is usually sufficient), but I read the first two paragraphs of this and had to stop. It reads like a creative writing exercise in poor writing. Too many words that need to be cut, laden with cliches. I rarely read the articles around here, are they really this bad? I'll stick to scanning the comments for "+5 Funny", thanks.
    • Not to mention that the page layout is all screwed up in opera, it cuts the rightmost few letters :(
    • Cut "pendantic". Italicizing "usually" will bring more emphasis to your point, and keep attention of the reader at the same time. Cut "of this", as you are replying to the original text, so the reader assumes which text, and it becomes redundant. Choose a word other than laden, as it is used to often with the word "cliche". Also, you need not admit in text that you don't read many of the websites, as the quality of your provided link, here [justonepath.org] reflects that.

      Thank you.
      • Uhhh were the fives seconds that it took you to go from my site to the reply window too long to remember three simple words or do you find that you can't even bring yourself to direct traffic to my site when you are making fun of it?

    • Re:Amateurish (Score:5, Informative)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:26PM (#13421376)
      Yeah seriously, its horrible. I mean honestly:

      "Each time a different colored cell is charged, this charges the atoms and converts them to ions and facilitates the release of UV photons due to the ionic collision. The inside wall of the cell is meted with a special treatment of a phosphor coating. This is done to exploit the phosphors property of giving out light when it comes in contact with other light."

      Ughh, barf, don't even bother to RTFA, not worth it. This [uiuc.edu] is a FAR more fascinating and in depth view into the workings and history of plasma displays.
      • "a lot of technologies and standards being spewed out of labs" it's like the scients have standards just brimming in their labs and you open the doors and BAM standards issue forth in torrents! i can't read this anymore.

  • Only 4? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drewbradford ( 458480 ) <drew@drewbradford.com> on Sunday August 28, 2005 @11:53AM (#13421244) Homepage
    4 states?

    What is this? 1990?

    We've actually doubled the number of states of matter in the past half century.

  • LCDs vs Plasma (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Snoolas ( 910809 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @11:53AM (#13421246)
    I'd personally be more interested in reading a comparison of Plasma and LCD. Preferably one that I could stand reading without my attention immediately turning to something else.

    • Re:LCDs vs Plasma (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      there you go [plasma-vs-lcd.com]
    • http://www.plasma-vs-lcd.com/ [plasma-vs-lcd.com]

      Seems like you can't really go wrong with either one. Could be frustrating if you're looking for the 'one true winner' though.

      • DLP. 80% of the image at 50% of the price. Also no burn in.
        • You can't hang a DLP on a wall. LCD has no burn-in, and neither do plasmas if you don't use them as airport schedule displays or something else retarded like that.

          I bought a plasma because I wanted a 50" screen I could hang on a wall, and a 50" LCD was 2.5x the cost of a plasma.
          • You can't hang a DLP on a wall. LCD has no burn-in, and neither do plasmas if you don't use them as airport schedule displays or something else retarded like that.
            You mean something "retarded" like watching standard def broadcasts (i.e. basically anything except for the big networks?) pillarboxed because you don't want to distort the image? That was the deal-breaker for me when I was shopping around.
            • That doesn't do anything. About half the stuff I watch is standard def, and the TV puts gray boxes on the sides so it wears evenly. Never been a problem. Seriously, burn-in is a big myth.

              Also, a lot more shows are being letterboxed these days. I like to watch Stargate and Battlestar Gallactica on Sci-Fi. They're standard def broadcasts, but they're letterboxed. I hit the "zoom" button on my cable box remote, and the picture fills the screen, eliminating the letterboxing on the top at bottom. It's nic
        • DLP's generally have a sucky side-viewing angle. If a color-wheel is in use, it can sound like a jet-engine. Moving parts can be volitile. Many people can see a "rainbow effect" due to the strobed color consolidation of a color-wheel.

          That being said, DLP's are the only "high end" option for people on a budget. Unless you're willing to go w/ Westinghouse/scepter/maxtent LCD's. E.g. the zenith of our day.

  • light photons thus released Ultraviolet (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Now the problem in plasma (unlike OLED) is that the light photons thus released belong to the Ultraviolet band and are therefore invisible to human eyes. This was where researchers got hitched until someone came up and suggested that they use these UV photons to incite visible light photons. Now to better understand this concept, lets look at how a normal plasma display is constructed."

    Now call me chicken and fry me in Kentucky, but isn't that exactly how fluorescent tubes work (and even to some extent cat

  • My discreet math professor (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28, 2005 @11:57AM (#13421261)
    My discreet math professor, Dr. Bitzer showed us some of the original designs he had of the plasma screen (which was originally was developed for his distance learning program) he told us that the original problem most designers were having was that they were trying to put the capictors (resisters for the alternating current) inside of the plasma chamber which made the displays too clunky

    he showed us his original working model

    • Re:My discreet math professor (Score:5, Funny)

      by kavau ( 554682 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @01:22PM (#13421600) Homepage
      If your math professor really was so discreet, he would never have shown you his model...
    • Why is Dr Blitzer so discreet? What are you guys hiding? Are you two involved in some sort of torrid affair? You can tell us. Nobody in here but us girls.
    • A capacitor is a resistor for alternating current? Believe it or not, resistors are resistors for alternating current, just like they are for direct current. Capacitors store energy in an electric field, and are second order devices, just like inductors that store energy in a magnetic field.

      What capacitors do is add "lead" to the current so that the current leads the voltage in phase. Inductors (coils) do the opposite, and make the current "lag" the voltage.

      At any rate, yes, capacitors are typically phys

  • There's more than four phases of matter (Score:5, Informative)

    by BlueStraggler ( 765543 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @11:58AM (#13421271)
    Make that "one of at over a dozen known phases of matter [wikipedia.org]" , not "one of the four phases".
    • Most people who don't have a heavy science background would proabably guess there are only 3, solid, liquid, and gas. A smaller percentage might add plasma in there, and a very small percentage might include the rest.
    • >>Make that "one of at over a dozen known phases of matter [wikipedia.org]" , not "one of the four phases".

      You might have a point if they had said what you said they did, but they didn't. They referred to four states of matter. As explained in the very article you link to people often confuse state with phase, but they are not the same thing.
      • Phase and state are synonymous in this context, as explained in the article I linked to:

        Phases are sometimes called states of matter, but this term can lead to confusion with thermodynamic states. For example, two gases maintained at different pressures are in different thermodynamic states, but the same "state of matter".

        The OP refers to solid, liquid, and gas, as the other "states", so they're clearly using it in the phase sense, not the thermodynamic sense. Besides, there an infinite number of th

  • Have they fixed the broken pixel problems yet? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shanep ( 68243 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:01PM (#13421282) Homepage
    Every long-term plasma display installation I have seen (train stations, malls, building foyers), have lots of broken, noisy pixels. As if a burn-in effect had occured. I took this problem into account when designing a display about 4 years ago, by randomly placing images/text (within constraints) and this still occured.

    I would be really pissed off if this happened to me on one of these super expensive displays. What's more, have they made plasma look good yet? I've never seen a plasma display which looked good. Even when opperated at their native resolution through digital interfaces.

    To me, they seem way overpriced for the quality and durability you get.
    • ``To me, they seem way overpriced for the quality and durability you get.''

      Also compared to other technologies? What technology would you chose for a 50" flat display, if not plasma? Note: I'm not an expert on these things, but I'm genuinely curious.
      • Also compared to other technologies? What technology would you chose for a 50" flat display, if not plasma?

        One called SED should be available early next year. It should be better than plasma, but more expensive than plasma for a while, despite being cheaper to make, because it is supposedly superior to plasma in many ways.

        One thing is that each display tech has its own benefits and drawbacks. If one was clearly superior in all ways, then we wouldn't be seeing so many types that we have now.

        Personally, my
        • I don't care about depth.. Weight is a non-trivial issue for me.. I move often enough that the one-time cost and danger of moving a multi-thousand dollar piece of equipment is worrisome. A 30" CRT therefore worries, me, but a 40" LCD I can lift single-handidly.

          Additionally, I don't know about why other people buy LCD's (looks perhaps?), but I get it for the lack of flicker.. Why else haven't we fully migrated to flourescet lighting.. It's smaller, lasts longer, brighter, cheaper... Because it gives me head
          • LCDs have no flicker. Though, ironically, they're often powered by something akin to flourescent lighting.

            Because it is flourescent lighting. It might just be higher frequency with the better displays. I think your bad experiences with flourecesnt lighting is because low frequency ballasts are used, technology has improved.

            LED displays flicker too. There may be explainations to why it doesn't bother you, but trust me, they flicker, it is visible to me.

            I am having some problems with CRT flicker, but I ha
      • Then for now, there's plasma and LCD.

        There is also SED/FED coming.

        If you just mean flat, there are many projection TVs, with LCD, DLP and LCOS (LCOS under various names) to choose from. Some of these are as thin as 12", even the deep ones are under 20" deep, which isn't bad for a 60" projector. These don't have the same viewing angle as the hang-on-the-wall types, but are a lot cheaper and often have a better picture.

        I saw a friend's brand-new (model) Pioneeer last night. He's had it for about 3 months, and
    • IMHO, my HD plasma looks incredible. What does look good to you?

      What's the durability concern? Panasonic states that a current display will reach half brightness in 60,000 hours. That's 20+ years if you watch 7 hours a day, every day and it's *half* brightness.

      http://www.panasonic.com/consumer_electronics/plas ma_microsite_05/flash.asp [panasonic.com]
      • Claims like that always bother me, because they imply a linear decrease in brightness over time. Whether that's the case or not doesn't seem all that obvious to me. How do we know it doesn't lose the first 25% of it's brigntness in the first 1,000 hours and then lose the next 25% over 59,000 hours? How do we know that once it's reached half brightness it doesn't fade out completely over the next few hundred hours? It doesn't seem implausable that there would be a steep spot on the brightness loss curve eith
        • This paper that appears to be propaganda by plasma TV manufactureres [google.com] designed to "break the myth" that plasmas get unacceptably dim over time shows that their TV lost 5.5% of it's brightness in the first 1.6% of it's advertised life. And those are the numbers that are supposed to make plasma look good.
        • It's a half-life [wikipedia.org] decay thing, so no, it's not linear. So, after 60,000 hours it'll be 1/2 as bright, and after 120,000 hours it'll be 1/4 as bright as it was originally.

          You can extend this, however, by turning down brightness of your display. There's no reason to run it at full-blast, anyway...it's over-bright.
          • It's a half-life decay thing, so no, it's not linear. So, after 60,000 hours it'll be 1/2 as bright, and after 120,000 hours it'll be 1/4 as bright as it was originally.

            Please show me any facts or evidence to back this up. I know that's what it sounds like from the claim, but it's not what the few available statistics I've seen show. Everything I've seen shows a steep initial decline, a period of slow, steady linear decline, and then who knows because the technology hasn't been around long enough yet.

            I have
            • I'm not an authority on the subject, but everything I've read about plasma technology leads me to believe it's a half-life decay. So, yes the initial brightness loss will be the steepest. That's where you get that 5% loss in 2% of the lifetime figure. The standard advice is to run full-screen, non-static images on it for the first 200 hours. After that, static images aren't as big a deal..it's only when the change is rapid, at the beginning of the display's life that you might have a problem.

              If you are
              • If you are convinced the brightness diminishes by 5% after the first few hundred hours, and then decays slowly, then what's the big deal?

                The big deal is that there isn't any data available that says where the big initial drop stops. I want to know it doesn't drop to 51% brightness right away, and then stay there for a while. (No, I don't believe this is likely, but why don't they show the curve?)

                Please, somebody show me the data, and I'll shut up, but the only things I've seen are measurements of the first
                • I hope the manufacturers are being honest but I guess we do have to take their claims lightly when it comes to expected lifespans of displays.

                  From my own personal experience, I don't think I'm just fooling myself to justify my purchase. The first thing I did is calibrate with Video Essentials and my brightness setting is 3 bars out of 32. It's been that way for the 13 months I've had the display. I guess I could use VE again to see if the brightness needs to be tweaked but to my eye, it still looks great
      • i would be more concerned about image burn-ins then i would about the display burning out. i don't want to spend 2 or 3 times as much on a plasma then an LCD and constantly have a task bar or desktop icon burnt into the screen. i'm sure your display looks good but if it looks twice as good for 1/2 the time at 4 times the cost you're better off with the cheaper display over time. (excuse the rather questionable TCO calculation but i'm sure you get the point)
      • What does look good to you?

        I've seen a large Sony CRT which looks better and now some rear projection TV's even look sharper than plasma.

        I hate seeing displays scale images with blurry outcomes and so often I see very large, very expensive plasma displays doing this.

        What's the durability concern?

        Every plasma I have seen in long-term display installations has failed severely. *Way* before I would expect a CRT to fail from burn-in effects.

        If Panasonic has fixed this, then you have answered my question.
    • Every long-term CRT display I have seen (Pac-man, Centipede, Ms. Pac-man), has lots of broken, noisy pixels. As if a burn-in effect had occured.

      Seriously, this happens to any display when used like this. Also, the displays I see at hotel lobbies and airports are the cheapest no-name brands they can find.

      On the other hand, get yourself a HD plasma from panasonic or pioneer and it is an absolute thing of beauty. Gorgeous crystal-clear images. Burn-in is a complete none-issue if you aren't a moron. I've n
      • Every long-term CRT display I have seen (Pac-man, Centipede, Ms. Pac-man), has lots of broken, noisy pixels. As if a burn-in effect had occured.

        Ha ha. Those games are like 20+ years old! With plasma I am talking (from my own personal experience) burn in from 1 to 2 years in installations that are 12 hours per day, 5 days per week. With CRT, burn-in causes the phosphors to become less effective and thus a reduction in brightness is seen. But with plasma "burn-in" (if it could be called that) causes this awfu
    • Is no-one worried also about the relatively high power consumption [technologyreview.com] of hugeass plasmas? We're trying to lower our power usage here, people - if America switched over to 60" plasma displays, power usage would shoot up. More pollution, unless you manage to switch to environmentally-friendly energy (haha).
    • What's more, have they made plasma look good yet? I've never seen a plasma display which looked good.

      I wholeheartedly agree. Plasma displays look like shit, they have a neon quality to the image that is completely artificial, I have never seen one I liked. It's as bad as the CRT TVs with "digital enhancement" and 100Hz gimmics, it does nothing to improve the quality of the image.

      • It's as bad as the CRT TVs with "digital enhancement" and 100Hz gimmics, it does nothing to improve the quality of the image.

        Tell me about it. I remember first seeing the 100Hz TV's with my home theatre enthusiast friends. They were commenting how great they looked and I was thinking, "W T F !?!?". They look like crap. "Oh you have to stand back for the 'effect' to work", "ahh, yeah, how much further do I need to go back before those crazy flashing patterns disappear?". ; )

        Expensive Grundig and Telefunken

  • Mirrordot Link (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gadgetfreak ( 97865 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:01PM (#13421284)
    If only chicks went down as easy as that server. [mirrordot.com]

  • Maybe they should have called the televisions "Ion Displays" instead?

  • Some real science... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This article mistakes plasma altogether. Plasma is a state of matter in which the electrons are so high in energy that they escape the pull of the nucleus and more or less become free flowing. It is laughable that the poster mentioned that a molecule splits into positive and negative ions upon reaching the state of plasma and then mentions noble gases which do not even form molecules (unless specially prodded). Atoms do become ionized during plasma phase but only because of the displacement of electrons:

  • Who stole the BE-condensate? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pbhj ( 607776 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:15PM (#13421334) Homepage Journal
    Four states of matter?

    Has the author been living in a hole? Even being conservative I think you'd have to plump for there being 5 states of matter.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_matter [wikipedia.org]

    That's aside from the poor wording which suggests that there are 7 states (or perhaps that's what he meant??).

  • "In-depth article"? No. It's an ad troll. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:21PM (#13421360) Homepage
    That's not an "article". It's just a troll to drive traffic to the site.

    'So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity.

    "Makes the gas more inert?" Those guys should stick to writing about case mods.

    Plasma panels have actually been around since the 1960s, [uiuc.edu] as neon-red displays. The early concept was that a sustaining voltage applied to all pixels kept them lit if they were on, and an X/Y array of wires could be used to turn individual pixels on and off. Thus, the display itself had memory, back when having enough memory to refresh the display was expensive.

    Color, intensity variation, and speed took a long time to achieve. Now there are transistor drivers behind every pixel, and the panel is built in what's effectively a big wafer fab. But that's not the toughest part of the manufacturing problem. All the electronics is on the back glass, while the phosphors are on the front. These two big pieces of glass have to be welded together with subpixel precision, held in contact only by millions of tiny ridges that have to match up. That's the most difficult step, and the one that limits display size.

    • I used to own a 386 laptop with a (monochrome) plasma screen. It was better than (mono) LCDs of the same era, because the refresh rate was much higher - you could play games on it without the blurry ghosting you got with LCDs. It was also the only laptop I've seen where the screen was hotter than the rest of it - a real problem if you didn't quite close the lid.
      • brightness and quickness of response have always been a positive of plasma.. But I always thought it wierd to put a plasma on a laptop, because plasma generally requires higher power drain than LCD. That plus plamas are generally heavier.

        Moroever, the viewing angle, brightness levels/control and refresh rates of LCD has caught up, and even in many respects outdone plasma these days.. There is simply too much momentum in the LCD market. I'm sure if similar levels of research were pushed into the plasma mar

  • No magic, nor gnomes? Ha! And you call this technology?

  • Etching (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tsa ( 15680 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:28PM (#13421383) Homepage
    In our cleanroom, we use plasmas for etching silicon. Plasma etching is a standard process that is used in the manufacturing of just about every chip. The plasma in TV-screens is generated in the same manner as the plasma in our etching machines. Therefore I have to conclude that plasma screens will suffer from the etching, and will not have a long lifetime. Add to that the amazing energy consumption, and my choice for my next TV is made: LCD, or maybe even another CRT. I still think CRT monitors give a better poicture than LCD, and for TV's the difference is even greater.
    • I would think that etching would depend strongly on the energy (temperature) of the plasma. Perhaps the plasma in the displays is less energetic than that used in plasma etching. Also, doesn't wafer-fab plasma etching use reactive ions, like oxygen?
      • Of course the etch rate depends on the temperature and the reactivity of the ions. A plasma etching machine also puts quite a lot of energy in the plasma to get a high etch rate. But plasma etching isn't just a chemical process; there is a strong physical component as well. Even with the low energies involved in getting a plasma screen to work, the ions that are formed in there will still hit the walls of their confinement chamber hard enough to remove material from them, and thus slowly destroy them.
  • Is there something stopping people from making a high-definition CRT TV? Most of the TVs I see that support more than 480 lines are not chunky enough to be CRTs.

    Yet I have this CRT with a VGA interface that supports up to 1600x1200 resolution. It cost about $80 and is 19" diagonally. It seems that small and mid-size HD TVs could be made by just slapping a TV tuner onto a computer display.

    Would it cost a lot to make a large (30-50 inches) CRT Television that supported more than 480 lines?
    • Isn't the size of a CRT limited by how strong the tube must be to withstand the atmosphere crushing it due to the vacuum inside the tube?

      This strength, of course, adds to the weight, which of course makes large tubes cumbersome and unattractive to consumers.

  • CRT is too low-res? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:33PM (#13421403) Journal
    consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines

    WTF does this have to do with Plasma vs. CRT? This is a limitation of analog vs. digital, not of any one display type.

    Seriously, think for a second. You're whining that your TV doesn't have great resolution when monitors are usually at least 1024x768. Um. Most monitors are still CRTs! I had a CRT that did 1600x1200 for years!

    Remember, plug a plasma TV into a coaxial cable plugged into standard analog cable TV, and you're going to get 640x480, no matter what the plasma is capable of.

    I'm not sure if I even want to finish reading the article after that.

  • DLP still better for me (Score:5, Informative)

    by ruiner13 ( 527499 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @12:34PM (#13421412) Homepage
    I have a 50" Samsung 3rd Gen DLP TV ($1600 at Best Buy a few months ago, 0% APR for 2 years). I could not be happier with it. Not only does it have more HD ports than any TV I found in its price range (VGA, DVI, HDMI, 2 x Component), the color and contrast ratio are outstanding (1500:1 claimed) using a 7-segment color wheel (and no, I do not see the rainbow effect, I believe partly die to the higher rotation rate of the 7 segment wheel). Not only that, but it does not suffer from burn-in or fading the way plasma does (important for me for gaming). The only part that needs periodic replacing is the lamp unit itself, which you can find online for around $200, and according to other people with similar sets to mine, each lamp lasts 2-3 years, depending on use. The power savings of DLP over plasma or CRT more than makes up for it, I believe the set I have uses 60-70 W during normal use. In the long run, I don't see plasma sticking around. I see technologies like DLP and LCoS (or D-ILA as JVC calls their version) being the market leaders in 5 years. Plasma always looks over-saturated and grainy to me, not to mention the heat that comes off those things. They might be a little brighter than most DLPs, but I do not believe they are worth it. The only plus side is their depth, 4" versus 14" or so for my DLP.
    • It's a personal preference thing. I'm glad you like your DLP and I'm even more glad that we have a lot of options when it comes to display technologies. I've had the opposite experience, DLP doesn't look as good to me as LCD or plasma. Judging by what's on display at stores isn't a fair comparison though, so I'm sure I would like DLP better if I saw a calibrated display.

      I've been gaming a LOT on my plasma for 13+ months now. No sign of burn-in or fading at all. I haven't noticed an excessive amount of
      • All DLPs are not created equal. In my shopping, I found many had a bad screen door effect (gaps between pixels). I cannot see the gaps in my set at all. Most sets have a 4 color wheel (RGB and clear, to boost brightness), which from what I saw created very pixelated shadow areas. The 3rd gen DLPs are of much better quality than the 1st and second gen, which I think you may have seen in the stores. I think the 5th gen sets are starting to come out soon, which offer true 1080i/p resolution (versus 720p n

  • OLED... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by CaptainFork ( 865941 )
    ...will wipe the floor with plasma, CRT and LCD technologies. It's still being perfected at the moment and there are problems with the intensity/lifetime of the blue elements. Once that's fixed it will pwn the entire display industry virtually overnight: cheap to make, runs cool, about 0.5mm thick, effectively instant response time and rugged (you may be able to roll them up like a carpet).

    Plasma screens will vanish as suddenly as they appeared once this stuff arrives. It's already production-viable in sma

    • Re:OLED... (Score:3, Informative)

      by meta-monkey ( 321000 )
      The OLED situation isn't quite THAT rosy, but it is promising. OLED lifetimes are lower than plasma right now, although it is getting better. And that whole "roll up the screen" business is a bad idea for anything you want to survive long-term, because any sealing problems that let in water will destroy the organics in the screen. I don't think you'll actually see large screen OLED displays on the market until 2008 or 2009. In the meantime, I bought a plasma.
    • I agree that plasma isn't a long-term solution, but you're greatly overstating the case for OLEDs. They're used in phones because a) it's small but also because b) phones tend to be replaced every few years. Higher-energy OLEDs (e.g. blue ones) tend to burn out pretty quickly at the moment. Perhaps this problem will eventually be solved, but I have no idea when that might be.

      Personally, I'd put my money on SEDs.
    • Um.. More like SED will wipe the floor of LCD and OLED; DLP will probably find a way to replace Plasma in the home.

      HJ
  • For instance, consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines. Compare this to at least 1024x768 resolution...

    What is he trying to say here? He's telling us that the resolution on a TV sucks compared to that of a computer, then uses it as a reason to change monitor technologies from CRT to plasma. Hey, the 1024x768 resolution he mention gen
  • Personally, I got more useful understanding out of this article at howstuffworks:
    http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/plasma-displa y.htm [howstuffworks.com]

  • short lived plasma screens (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've bought a plasma big screen about a year ago and now the first pixels are already starting to die. After speaking to several people in the field and doing some research on the subject I found out that this is completely normal for plasma screens and that their life span is inherently limited to about 5-7 years. I am enraged that stores don't tell you this at all. My next big screen will be either a LCD or a projection screen.

  • Sci-facts [OT] (Score:2, Informative)

    by minginqunt ( 225413 )
    To pedantically correct the original poster, there are *at least* six states of matter, possibly more.

    1) Solid
    2) Liquid
    3) Gas
    4) Plasma
    5) Bose-Einstein condensate
    6) Fermionic condensate

    I now take my Physics-pedant hat off and apologise.

  • CRT array techology (Score:3, Interesting)

    by plusser ( 685253 ) on Sunday August 28, 2005 @04:11PM (#13422455)
    I see no mention here of a technolgy that was delveloped about 10 or 15 years ago to produce large flatscreen television based on CRT technology.

    The idea is this. Remember back in the 1980's when all you had was basically CRT screens and nothing else. Somebody then realisied that you could arrange a large number of CRTs in a grid array and produce a much bigger picture by sending a segment of the video signal to each screen.

    It was then noticed that this large array of CRT had a much thinner profile than having on very large CRT. What happened was that one of the CRT manufacturers of the time decided to construct a large panel screen by using several thousand small CRTs in an array, each one emulating a function of a pixel.

    Looking at the description of large plasma displays, the technology in arranging pixels very similar (the only different being the method used to generate the charge to generate the phosphor glow). It may be that using CRTs was too expensive, and plasma was cheaper to use.

    Any body else know about this technology?
    • They were/are called "Field Emission Displays" (FED), if I recall correctly. The idea was to take a flat plate of glass (or equivalent) with normal CRT phosphors, but behind each phosphor put multiple tiny solid-state electron emitters. In other words, instead of taking a single electron beam and sweeping it repeatedly across the screen, put multiple weak electron beams behind each subpixel. The rationale for using multiple beams was avoidance of dead pixels. If there were, say, six emitters behind each sub
  • "There are limitations to CRT that are being felt increasingly as the need for higher resolution televisions increase each day. For instance, consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines."

    What are they talking about??

    Most computer montiors are CRTs and there's nothing limited about them, IIRC they still beat plasma and LCD displays in

  • Plasma Universe (Score:2, Informative)

    by bluevector ( 732221 )
    Plasma physics not only governs the operation of your plasma television, it may also dominate the large scale structure and behavior of the universe (star formation, galaxy formation, intergalactic structures . . .); though most scientists are either unaware that this is so, or are not ready to admit it.

    Check out the following:

    Plasma Cosmology .net [plasmacosmology.net]

    Plasma Universe [lanl.gov]

    Guided Tour of the Plasma Universe [lanl.gov]

    Electric Currents and Transmission Lines in Space [lanl.gov]

    Immense Flow [lanl.gov]

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