I was perusing Best Buy at lunchtime, and was drawn to the plasma/LCD TV area. Mmmmmm, neat.

What's the difference between plasma and LCD?

Are dead pixels a problem?

Do the screens last more than a few years?

When will the US have 16:9 for most TV programming, cable or satellite or whatever, to take advantage of the wide screens?

One surprising observation- there are $6,000 TV's with really shitty pictures (some were very "pixelated"; others had very gray blacks).

Don't pretend to be an expert as such but we've recently taken the plunge with a dinky 22" LCD for the bedroom wall. Been waiting for prices to drop in the UK and they're now 50 - 75% of what they were six months ago. No idea on the US or other markets though.

Be very careful with regards to dead pixels. Some manufacturers consider as many as 5 to be acceptable dependant on where they are in relation to being noticeable. Try and see the screen before you buy if possible.
Screen life is estimated to be as good as CRT these days but we still factored in a 5 year extended warranty.

Some Plasmas have real noisy cooling fans and are much heavier than LCD.They also suffer from screen burn - those bright static logos on Sky Digital frinstance can damage the screen permanently in a very short space of time. Apparently.

If you're choosing a LCD TV the thing to look for is Contrast Ratio and Brightness - The higher the better.

We're well pleased with ours. Colours are real, images are sharp, black is black and there's no trailing blur on DVD at all. Sounds quite nice too.

P

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One surprising observation- there are $6,000 TV's with really shitty pictures (some were very "pixelated"; others had very gray blacks).

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The problem for video is exactly the same as for audio, bad setup ruins good equipment.

It might be worth trying to see the same equipment at a couple of different stores, I'm constantly amazed that many stores selling TVs don't even have a decent ariel feed. Things are better now with DVD as a source, but the set still needs to be properly connected and adjusted.

LCD lasts 3x longer than plasma (approximately) and as mentioned, screen burn isn't an issue with LCD.

LCD also (on good ones) seems to have a better contrast and less smearing; I'd go for LCD like a shot if I had the cash.

As mentioned, plasmas often have fans that can be very distracting.

__________________________
Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.

LCD or PLasma is not really a choice - typically smaller screens are LCD and larger screens are plasma - so unless you want a middling size screen you do not have a choice of technologies.

Hearsay from the Heathrow Show
At the Sony stand I was talking to the Sony rep about the big Sony plasma sets - some snippets of the conversation

- the growth in demand for plasma is greater than expected by the manufacturers and the manufuacturing plants have to be built or converted from building tube TVs. Hence the price of the big screens will not fall as fast as previously introduced technology

Life expectancy of plasma is the same as a tube based set

There is a shortage of service agents in Europe that can handle plasma screens - and the service costs are very high - oh and extended warranties were difficult to get.

How much of the above is spin or truth - I do not know but hey how much truth is on the internet anyway<g>

Derek

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It depends how you define "large" but 50 inch LCDs are already on the market.

The price of a 22" has fallen quite dramatically - £2500 SRP back in May 2003 is now £999.

30" has fallen from around £3500 to around £2250.

We had quite a job finding one in stock - demand's outstripping supply by quite a margin.

P

RE larger LCDs - I stand corrected by your superior knowledge - my contact on Tuesday indicated that 30" was the crossover point from LCD to Plasma

Derek

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I can't remember all the differences between LCD and plasma, but you can find that easily on the internet. Perhaps CNET or some home theatre website could shed some light on the subject. The next big technology is Samsung's DLP. It's rather interesting, and beyond my understanding, but it produces a picture with the brightness and contrast of a LCD while still retaining the resolution, warmth and colour of a CRT. Quite amazing. Best Buy has it on display, I'm surprised you didn't mention it.

In the US, all cable channels will be broadcasting both the HDTV and regular signal by 2006. At the moment, only the major networks do so. My cousin just bought a 57" Toshiba projection TV and although I like the 16:9 for movies and even TV, I don't think the picture is as nice as my 36" Toshiba CRT set. Even DVDs seem more colourful on my set. For example, Matrix Reloaded is easily the best digital transfer I have seen on DVD to this date. It may be even TOO digital. But on my cousin's projection TV, it wasn't so obvious. Rather surprising when his picture was progressive scan and mine is good old interlaced. I wasn't expecting that. His room is rather small for such a large sized TV and that may have been a factor, but I've never been too impressed with the projection sets to be honest. I think it is a personal thing though as he is ecstatic with the setup I left him with.

Hmmm, more like a rambling than an answer to your questions, sorry about that.

Interesting comments. I don't plan to buy one of these; I'm simply curious.

I'll buy one when a) a 42" costs less than $2,000; and b) every single channel of interest is broadcast in 16:9.

RE: the setup, I believe all TV's were fed a digital satellite signal. Still, there were major differences in quality. At 4', the Best Buy logo appeared as a jagged, pixelated mess on some. That shocked me.

Ludwig, brutal consumer and admitted cheapskate

(PS- IMO very few of the plasma/LCD's bested the adjacent Sony WEGA, Panasonic, and Toshiba CRT's in the store.)

I have a Panasonic 42" Plasma which has been in use daily for 18 months with no problems and no perceived reduction in picture quality. I have not had to adjust brightness, contrast, color etc at all, it's still running with the factory settings. Mine does not use a fan and I gather that current generation plasma's mostly don't need fans.

I also have seen it in several different locations that life expectancy on Plasmas is typically 10 years of normal viewing and more.

When I was in the US, trips to Fry's, Circuit City and Best Buy all dissapointed. The pictures on both the projection Tv's and Plasma's were all crap. Why I do not know, since with a normal TV signal they certainly don't have to be crap.

Of course there is NTSC vs PAL to take into account but both should look pretty good in progressive scan. BBC in the UK has just gone 16:9 but my Plasma has a so called "justify" option which by a combination of very slightly streching at the edges and zooming in the middle makes a good job of filling the 16:9 with a normal size picture ( really no noticeable shape distortion).

We don't have HDTV like you lucky bastards over there, but maybe 1 day.

LCD IS better AND currently much more expensive but when my plasma dies on me (fingers crossed in 10 years time as published) I am sure I will be able to replace a wall in the room with an LCD or OLED screen.

GEOFF

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Originally posted by Derek Wright:

- the growth in demand for plasma is greater than expected by the manufacturers and the manufuacturing plants have to be built or converted from building tube TVs. Hence the price of the big screens will not fall as fast as previously introduced technology

Derek

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Alternatively you could consider pricing strategy - plasma is relatively new product for the consumer market. As such the consumer views it as a premium product. As long as top of the range tv sets (I am ignoring the very top strata of crt sets eg B&O, Loewe etc) sell for around the £2K mark you have a base pricing level for plasma.

Longetivity - I do not have my blurb at hand but I am pretty sure that the manual for the Fujitsu suggested 10 years for the display on the basis of "normal" viewing (ie not in use 24/7) and as such I guess this is less, but not significantly so, from a crt set.

Mike